Christine Son

I Am What I Am--A Writer

2010-09-20T19:50:00.002-05:00

I used to run. A lot. And in keeping with my penchant for extremes, my running exploded with a frenzied eagerness that bordered on insanity. A lap around the track quickly became two. Two became four. A mile turned into three, and then five, and before I knew it, I was running at least twelve miles a day, every day. I took breaks only on days when my legs were so stiff that I thought paralysis was imminent. I ran through pulled muscles, shin splints, fractured bones. I ran until I ended up in a cast. I ran when it was 112 degrees outside, when rain was coming down sideways, when roads were slick with ice. I ran to feel the air around me, to focus my thoughts, to chase angels, to escape demons. I ran like this for seven years. Because I wanted to. Because I had to.

But I wasn’t a runner. Not in the least. What I was was an addict, an obsessive compulsive who woke up itching to suck down an eight-miler, who ended her days with another hit, who freaked out when a treadmill wasn’t available on vacation, who became jittery and unpleasant when injury or illness made running impossible. I didn’t love running. I didn’t even like it. When I look back at my running days, I don’t remember euphoria or a feeling of accomplishment or even a brief moment of serenity. What I remember is ice baths, aching knees, enormous amounts of Aspercreme. And when I stopped running, I felt as if a period in my life had closed for good, as if I somehow knew that I wouldn’t again be reaching for a worn pair of Asics.

I haven’t.

And I don’t miss it.

So, when I started writing, I wondered if my newest obsession would be a repeat of my youth, if I would tackle the craft with the same foolish urgency and recklessness and verve that only the undamaged dare. I questioned whether my nascent passion was already doomed to a finite shelf life, if it would follow the trajectory of so many passions I’d discarded when my interest waned in favor of the next Kilimanjaro. I worried that if I was capable of an all-out assault on whatever had captured my imagination, then I was incapable of seeing it through to completion. But I wrote anyway. And I wrote with the same urgency and recklessness and verve that the unmindful dare, wrote in the wee hours of the morning, in the still hours of the night. I wrote until an agent would have me, until a publisher signed me, until my book was on the shelves of Barnes & Noble. I wrote another novel afterwards, and then another, obsessed over them, wrote second and third versions of them. Half a million words in all, carefully chosen, and then re-chosen, made malleable and lyrical, monstrous and wonderful.

I tucked both works-in-progress into a drawer.

And then I stopped writing. Because life got in the way. Because my muses went on holiday. Because I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to say. Because I simply didn’t feel like writing anymore.

A year of silence. A year of quiet, of a sleeping laptop, of a mind devoid of characters and plots and dialogue. I wondered if my previous worry had come to fruition, if I’d climbed Kilimanjaro and was now looking toward Everest, if I was searching for an oasis, if I was lost in a desert. I wondered if my passion and love and obsession with words had waned, if it had come to a close, if I was damned to an incongruous series of preoccupations.

A year of this.

Until I realized that I miss writing. I miss it terribly.

Because I am a writer. In the most. Because what I remember about having written is not so much the endless hours of madness searching for the right word on the tip of my brain, nor the thankless nights of work when the rest of the world was asleep. What I remember is the euphoria of finding that right word, the serenity of dawn when I put to paper a world so alive to me that I almost forgot it was imaginary, the accomplishment of finishing a novel that brings a smile to me still. Because if running was a jacket that I’d worn until it shredded at the seams and found its way to the trash bin, then writing is a part of me that can’t be extricated from my being. It’s my central nervous system, my heart, my blood, my soul. It’s there even when laying fallow, even when I don’t know what to do with it.

This comforts me. It stills the gnawing anxiety that a long break means more than that, tempers the fear that opportunity has passed me by. It allows me to pull back and take a breath, realize that I have a lifetime to find my words, to improve my craft, to distill my thoughts, to understand my characters, to breathe life into them.

I’ve got some writing to do.

So Very Much To Be Grateful For

2009-11-25T22:17:00.002-06:00

It’s been a long, long time since I’ve blogged. Back up. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve written at all. My absence was, in part, the result of the unceasing demands of my day job. But a lot of it was self-imposed, too, a retreat from a world that depends so heavily on one’s Muses. And mine had taken an extended holiday, leaving me to tackle some heavies that had exploded my 2009 in ways that I both expected and wasn’t sure that I was ready for. Suffice it to say that it’s been a difficult year, one that caused me to consider, and reconsider, and reconsider again, where I fit in this world, what I expect out of myself, what I expect out of others, what I want, what I need—essentially everything I thought I’d already figured out. And in an insomniatic moment of self-reflection, I made a balance sheet of my life, the pros and cons of being me, as if writing them down could possibly organize the myriad thoughts that were zig-zagging in my mind. Ludicrous, perhaps. But what I discovered was that my pros list was much longer than my cons (mostly because I believe that inanities like, “awesome collection of ruffled shirts” and “full head of hair” count as pros). And that recognition colored my greater perception, made me realize how truly, ridiculously, unfairly fortunate I really am. So much so that I made a list the things I am most grateful for on this day nationally sanctioned to give thanks:

1. My family. Yes, they are insane. And yes, I am the progeny of a mother who once said, “Sweetheart, family is what God puts in your life because no normal person would ever pick these people to be their friends.” True that. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate my family—my mother especially—for what they are. And what they are not. I’m grateful that I can watch a movie, curled up against my mom on the couch, without having to say a word the entire evening. I’m grateful that she knows me so well that where she once was enormously hard on me, she is now constantly worried that I am too hard on myself. I am grateful that my family—for all of its faults—is kind and generous and affectionate and open-minded. Most of all, I’m grateful that they are always, always there for me. And that they frequently tell me so.

2. My friends. The ones I’ve known for years, the ones I’ve only just met; the mature sages who understand my neuroses, the ebullient imps who share my childlikeness; the viscerally unfiltered who revel in my frankness, the thoughtfully discreet who bring out my introspective side; the hysterically funny who make me laugh until my back seizes, the heartbreakingly vulnerable who rouse my protectiveness; those who are always ready to give a smile, a laugh, a hug, a hand, a heart, an ear, a shoulder; those who make my heart beat faster; those who slow down the frenetic pacing of life; those who are all of the above and infinitely more. For them, there shall never be anything I won’t give, or do, or say, or be. And for them, it shall never take a holiday or special occasion to say what I feel on a daily basis—that I love them to no end. That I will always be there for them. Unconditionally.

3. My job. Okay, maybe not the exact job I have right now, which is apparently that of an indentured servant, complete with a cowbell noosed around my neck and a cattle prod positioned over my hind end. But it does come with a bimonthly means to afford my pros (ruffled shirts and hair products, for example), and it does flex my gray matter in ways that I wouldn’t have otherwise known. It’s given me instruments that I can place in my toolbox of skills and an exposure to some rather incredibly awesome people. And it has introduced me to creatures so bizarre that they will inevitably make it in my next novel as a character. Congrats, you soon-to-be-immortalized weirdos! Which brings me to…

4. Writing. ‘Tis been eons, dear, elusive passion of mine. And oh, how thou maddens me with your creative blocks and word gluts and crises of confidence. But when it’s good—when the ideas flow, when the characters speak, when the words harmonize just so—it’s so very, very good. Words thrill me, and if you’re a fellow writer, then you understand the quest to find just the right word, the one that fits perfectly into a sentence and creates the perfect string of notes, the melody that makes you read the sentence again, just because you like the sound of it. Characters consume me, become a real part of my consciousness. They compel me to become a keener observer in real life, a better listener, a student of the whys and logic of the human mind and spirit. And if I may torture this analysis even further, I dare say that the exercise behind writing makes me a better person, makes me more thoughtful and reflective and compassionate, less critical and judgmental and narrow-minded. It has been too long since I’ve put musings to paper, but I am grateful for the temperance of time and the fact that my pie of life contains a slice so incredibly beautiful. At least to me.

And finally…

5. The small things. I read somewhere—probably a verbose fortune cookie—that I shouldn’t sweat the small stuff, and that everything is small stuff. I don’t like this. For one, yes, there is big stuff. There will always be big stuff. And if you don’t believe that, try telling this little axiom to a person who’s just lost a child or has a loved one in Iraq and see if you don’t get a swift upper hook to the jugular in response. More than that, though, I don’t like how it connotes a discounting of everything to the repressed trivial when it may be anything but. Because I used to think that life was a series of big things—graduation, career, marriage, children, death—connected together by the little things, like major organs supported by the interstitial. I don’t think that way anymore. I think of life as being the interstitial, the little things that often get swept aside in favor of the proverbial big. It’s the little things that inform my view on a person’s character, the quickness of one’s temper or smile rather than one’s resume of accomplishments, the kind act when no one’s watching rather than the lifetime achievement banquet in his honor. It’s the smile in the midst of a harried day, the offered seat in a crowded bar, the text from a friend just to make sure I’m all right. That, to me, is life. It’s what makes the big manageable, what tempers it and places it into a context that neither aggrandizes nor belittles. And when it comes down to it, when I am lying on my deathbed, I doubt that I will be dwelling on the fact that I won a landmark lawsuit, or that I’d published a book, or that I’d discovered the cure for chronic fatigue syndrome. No, I imagine that I’ll be reminiscing about a road trip with a special someone, the grand old time I had a friend’s party, the exact words my brother uttered that made me feel like everything was going to be better than fine.

And so, I guess that’s my takeaway from this year—that, despite the difficulties that will always shade our backdrop, there is so, so much to be grateful for. There is beauty in the seemingly nothing, delight in the ostensibly mundane. There is optimism and hope and an ability to look at the bright side of things. An ability to take the big and break it down into precious littles, an ability to take the littles and mold them into an object of import. I am grateful because I can be grateful, positive because I don’t know another way to be, blessed when I don’t deserve to be, fortunate in ways I can’t describe.

And so are you.

Happy Thanksgiving. May you eat so much turkey that you fall asleep before you realize your stomach has exploded.

Slumdog Millionare—It [Life] Is Written. And It [Life] Is A Total Crapshoot

2009-05-25T21:37:00.002-05:00

I’m not what you’d call a big moviegoer. I’m terrified of crowds. I don’t enjoy the smell of popcorn. I can’t sit still for two or (oh, God) three hours at a time. I’m busy. And for the last year, everything at the theater looked unappealing to me. So, I was a little remorseful when, two nights ago, I finally saw Slumdog Millionaire on cable. Because while it was lovely on TV, it would’ve been brilliant on the big screen.

If you haven’t seen the movie, it deserves all the praise it’s received. The cinematography is beautiful. The acting is superb. The story unfolds like the best kind of novel, flipping between past and present without ever losing its viewer. Drawing her in and widening her eyes with anticipation for what’s to come next. Looping back and connecting all the dots, like a thoughtfully constructed puzzle. The characters are by turns charming, vile, frightening, loving, dejected, resolute, hopeful — everything that people are in real life.

But it was the setting of the movie that really stuck with me, the abject, heartbreaking poverty that compels the main characters to do what they do, to find ingenious ways to survive, to succumb to breath-arresting exploitive cruelty, to ponder — and sometimes become convinced of — the idea that destiny has a hand in everything. That fate or God has preordained one’s existence to the utter preclusion of alternatives, good or bad. That wondering about this for too long only leads to the maddening recognition of existence’s circularity, of the balance of trying one’s damnedest against the idea that destiny necessitated such exertion in the first place.

One could think about this until she went crazy.

Or, if you’re me, you could set the idea of destiny next to its philosophical twin — that life is a total crapshoot. Because we don’t choose to be born in the slums of Mumbai any more than we have the power to be born in the Seventh Arondissement of Paris. We don’t elect to be birthed into a lowly Indian caste or an isolated housing project in North Korea any more than we are entitled to be birthed in the Upper East Side. We don’t get to pick when we make our appearance on Earth, or where, or in what time frame or into which slice of the socio-economic pie. And if we really want to get nitpicky about this, we don’t get to select our skin color or our IQ or our level of hotness. It’s this awareness that makes me cringe when I see people act with an unattractive sense of entitlement. Why snobbery and arrogance and a general I’m-Better-Than-You attitude grates me in the worst possible way. Why racism and sexism and every other kind of –ism makes no kind of sense. Because the truth of the matter is that no one’s inherently better than anyone else. That it’s what’s on the inside of a person that really counts. We learn these extraordinarily basic axioms in elementary school. Somehow, we forget it by the time we’re in middle school. We forget it so violently that we spend the rest of our lives trying to one-up each other, to compare ourselves by how much stuff we have, how many designer labels and exotic cars and vacation homes we can claim. How many people we know, how many important people we know, how much money we have, how much clout. We laud the beautiful and the privileged, spend eternity trying emulating and envying them. And in our ugliest moments, we are thankful that if we cannot be X, then at least we are not Y.

For what?

Are there really any answers?

Of course, I’m not immune to any of this. I mean, I live in the real world. I’m insecure. I’m competitive. I’m petty. I’m vain. Hell, I’m a girl. And I’m not one to pitch a person’s controllable faults into the wastebasket of “life is a crapshoot,” either. But I’ve also been soul-searching a bit recently, which might be one of the best and worst consequences of writing character-driven fiction. And I’ve been thinking about this elusive notion of where my characters — and as an extension, where I — fit into this crazy world. And for all the whys and what fors that I can pitch, I realize that the answer that works best for me brings me back to the central character of the movie — try, try, try, world unending, amen. Be better today than what you were yesterday. Be better tomorrow than what you are today. And be kind. Always. Because you never know who might loop back around in this drama of life. Who might need a hand or be the one to extend one.

There is, of course, the central matter of love in Slumdog Millionaire. Enduring, unflinching, bet-your-life-on-it love. It is, to be punny, lovely. But I’m not a movie critic tasked to relay central themes. I’m a writer who is inordinately distracted by shiny objects in the distance. With a blog in which she gets to describe what she just saw. ☺

Congratulations, You’ve Decided To Become A Published Novelist! Now What?

2009-05-20T19:48:00.003-05:00

I’ve been meaning to blog about writing — both the technical mechanics of the craft and the business side of it — for ages. Back up. I’ve been meaning to blog for ages. Unfortunately, my work-in-progress was taking forever, and I’ve been snowed at the office, and family this and life that and blah blah blah…

Anyway, quite a few people have asked how one goes about getting published. And I’ve gotten so many requests for a roadmap that I promised to blog about it. Well! Ask and (four months later) ye shall receive!

To give you an overall analogy, the road to publishing isn’t unlike the road to building a house. There’s the actual writing of a novel (more on that in another post) — the actual building of the house, the blueprints and nails and hammers and load-bearing walls and electric wiring and plumbing and whatnot. And there’s the publishing of a novel — the bureaucratic process of having a house built, the permits and approvals and inspections and so forth. To publish a novel, you need both. Yes, even you, the Next-David-Foster-Wallace of Boise, Idaho who’s got connections. And while I’m by no means an expert in the field, I have been through the looking glass and can give you my two cents on the matter (this is my way of saying, “take this post for what it’s worth”). So, without further, ado, here are the eight easy steps (ha!) to getting your Great American Novel published * **:

1. The Novel. Write your novel. The entire novel. Edit it. Have your literate friends and family read it. Demand that they give you brutally frank critiques. Join a writer’s group if it helps. Have them read and give you brutally frank critiques. Check your spelling and grammar. Use Times New Roman, 12-font. Double-spaced. 1” margins all around. Don’t justify your margins. These are industry standards. Follow them. In other words, present your work as perfectly and professionally as you can.

2. The Agent. If you are writing fiction, then you absolutely must have an agent. Due to the overwhelming volume of submissions (and copyright liability issues), most publishing houses will flat-out refuse to read anything unless it comes from an agent. The vast majority of agents lives in New York, but don’t be afraid to scout those who live elsewhere. Check out The Association of Authors’ Representatives, Inc. (AAR) (www.aaronline.org). The AAR site is chock full of information and includes its Canon of Ethics. Agents should not charge you money up front. Ever. There are just as many scammers as there are legit agents. Beware the agent who guarantees that you’ll be published. He might as well promise you that you’re going to win America’s Next Top Model. Might happen. Might not. A note: don’t preclude agents who are not members of the AAR, either. Some of the best agents are not. But be sure to confirm that he or she follows the AAR’s Canon of Ethics.

Which agents should you target? Check out if the agent you’re researching represents your genre. Some only deal with adult fiction. Some only work with YA writers. Some are exclusively non-fiction agents. And so on and so forth. Kathryn Brogan’s Guide to Literary Agents is a good resource. So is Jeff Herman’s Guide to Book Publishers, Editors & Literary Agents. These books are rather pricey and change very quickly, so visit your local library for current editions. While you’re there, look at books in your genre. Check out the acknowledgements page. Every author thanks her agent. See who rep’ed said author. Check out authors’ websites and look at their contacts page. Stalkerati, much? Indeed. It’s called Due Diligence. Make a list of your favorite dozen (or two or three or hundred) agents. Know what their submissions guidelines are.

3. The Query Letter. The dreaded query letter. Your chance to show the agent in very few words why you’re the shiznit. There are many ways to do this, but they should generally be limited to one page, single-spaced. In a few succinct paragraphs, state what you wrote (general idea of the novel in as interesting a way as you can manage) and who you are (background, education if relevant, writing awards if any, why you’re uniquely qualified to write this book). If the submissions guidelines request sample pages, include them. If they specifically ask that you don’t, don’t. You don’t want to come across as being unable to follow directions from the get-go. Use white paper, for God’s sake. Don’t spritz it with perfume. Don’t include a picture of yourself nude on a chaise lounge. Seriously. I’ve been told that way too many people actually do this. Triple proofread it before you send. Make sure you’ve addressed it to the right person. Sounds ridiculous that I should include this advice, but when you’ve got fifteen (or three dozen) query letters in front of you, all of them following varying guidelines, you might be surprised how easy it is to make a mistake.

Because I am hopelessly OCD and Type-A, I made an excel spreadsheet that listed which agents I sent query letters to, when and with what. Why? So that I wouldn’t send repeat letters to the same people. So that I knew how long it had been since my submission (i.e., when I might sent an email to the agent asking if he or she had received my query letter). So that I felt like I had some modicum of control over the process.

4. Wring Hands and Wait. Many agents’ websites will say that they’ll get back to you within 4-6 weeks. Many of them won’t. Not because they’re evil and want to personally torture you. But because they often get a thousand (no joke) query letters a week. A week. And reading query letters isn’t their only function. They’re negotiating deals for their current authors, reading and editing (if they’re of the editing brand) their authors’ work, reading requested drafts of submissions, speaking at conferences, raising children, etc. They’re wicked busy. When can you call them to see if they like you? Pretty much never. Don’t call them. It’ll irritate them. It’ll likely get you dinged before you’ve even had the chance to get your work before them.

This was probably the most difficult part of the process for me. I am a lawyer. I worked for ages in an environment that screamed if a draft wasn’t ready in a day, lost its shit if the brief wasn’t perfect in two. Partners were always at my door, asking when I would be finished, where was the GD pleading, how much longer, why isn’t it ready, are we there yet? I am also incredibly impatient by nature and push myself to exhaustion on a daily basis. My unfortunate personality and my job made me expect that everyone — agents included — were just like me. Where were these agents? I’d ask. Have they read my query yet? Why not? My God, but it’s been thirteen days and six hours! What. Is. Taking. So. Long?? I was fortunate enough to have what I now call my Writing Fairy Godmother basically wring me out and tell me to calm the f*ck down. That publishing doesn’t work like the legal field. That I would quickly make myself persona non grata if I couldn’t learn to Sit Down, Shut Up And Wait. That would be my advice to you (without the neck-wringing and the F-bombs). To be patient when you’re practically bursting at the seams with anxiety and anticipation. To keep in mind that agents are working as quickly as they can. That they are looking for the next Brilliant Work as much as you’re trying to get your Brilliant Work in front of them.

(Now, if the guidelines said 4-6 weeks, and it’s been eight, yeah, it’s okay to send an email or a letter asking if said agent received the query (but don’t call)).

5. Rejections. Horrible. Horrible. But if you get one (or 200), welcome to the club! You’re now officially one of us. Every author has gotten a rejection. Some rejections will bear a stamp with a single word: “No.” Some agents might feel generous and stamp, “No, thanks.” Others will have nothing written on your letter. It’s simply returned and you can assume they’re just not that into you. Some will take the time and explain why your work isn’t what they’re looking for. Don’t sweat it. Don’t take it personally. Don’t think you’re a lesser person or untalented because of it. All you need is one to say “yes.” So much easier said than done, no?

My husband saved all of my rejection letters, by the way. The entire two-foot stack. So that when I was rich and famous, I could look back on it and gleefully shout, “So, who’s the reject now, suckas?” I don’t know if you’re into that. I still haven’t shouted at it. He has. He clearly doesn’t understand what “rich and famous” means.

6. The Agent Likes You! and wants you to send the first chapter. Or the first three. Or the entire novel. This is why you need to have your novel perfected and ready to go. This industry is notoriously wait-wait-wait-wait-I-want-it-all-NOW. You might get a response from your query in a week. And the agent might want the entire work immediately. If it’s not finished, she may pass. She might find someone who’s written something very similar to yours. She might not be willing to wait while you take the next two years to finish your masterpiece. So, git ‘r done before you query.

7. What Now? If the agent likes your work, she may ask to represent you. A contract might be involved. Or she may be old school and request an oral agreement with you. There’s no right or wrong way of going about it. If you’re not an attorney and skittish, it’s not a bad thing to take the contract to a lawyer (caveat: make sure he specializes in these matters. Trust me. Just because someone has an “Esq.” by his name doesn’t mean that he knows jack about publishing. The industry is an animal onto its own, and the lawyer must be versed in it). But if she’s an AAR member (or follows it’s ethical guidelines), you probably don’t need to worry. Do whatever makes you sleep well at night.

8. Submissions to Publishers. The agent will send your work to appropriate publishers. Let the waiting games —and teeth gnashing and nail biting and howling at the moon — begin. No one ever talks about what actually happens once the manuscript goes to, say, Random House or Penguin or Simon & Schuster. The process is often affectionately (read: exasperatedly) called the Black Box. But from my stalkerati research, blog-reading and agent-questioning, I’ve gleaned that the process goes something like this:

- manuscript lands on junior editor’s desk. Junior editor reads, adores it.
- Junior editor sends to senior editor (there may be several senior editors who read them in seriatum or all together). Senior editor(s) love(s) it.
- Senior editor(s) sends to acquisitions editor. Acquisitions editor reads, adores it.
- Acquisitions editor sends to acquisitions board.
- Every member of the acquisitions board reads, loves it.
- Acquisitions board sends to publishing board. Also sends to marketing/accounting group.
- Every member of the publishing board reads. Number crunchers decide whether the book will make money.
- Publishing board loves it. Number crunchers see profit.
- Manuscript goes to publisher. An actual person who has the final yay/nay vote.
- Publisher loves it. Calls agent. Offers advance money.
- Agent calls author. Relays offer. Discuss whether to demand more, take to another house or accept (this, I can’t comment on. This is strictly between you and your agent as to what to do).
- Author accepts. Everyone is happy. Author goes out and gets tanked to celebrate.

Depending on the agent’s clout, several steps at the beginning may be skipped. And depending on the size of the publishing house, there may be one, several or no acquisitions/publishing board. What I do know is that should anyone say “no/pass,” then it’s game over. It’s a wonder that anything ever gets published.

Okay, so that, in a very long nutshell, is what happens up to the point of sale. The aftermath — the editing that occurs in-house, the release date, sales, publicists, marketing, etc., is the icing stress that really, really varies.

Also, I know that as much info as I’ve tried to give, clearly, it’s not enough. There’s never enough answers to an aspiring writer, I’ve found. But, there are resources. I love Absolutewrite.com. I love Backspace (bksp.org). I love pubrants.blogspot.com (from an agent’s point of view). These forums will have topics on anything you could possibly wonder. And if not, you can always pitch the question. Hell, if you really want, feel free to pitch me a question, and I’ll do my best to answer or point you in the right direction. Just give me four months or so. ☺

* Disclaimer: there are, of course, many exceptions to these steps. You might be Paris Hilton’s Chihuahua, for example, or Tila Tequila, and have an automatic in. In fact, publishers likely came running to you to get your awesomeness immortalized in print. But if you were not born a pampered Taco Bell dog or have shot to MySpace/MTV superstardom by being an exhibitionist leprechaun, then you will need to follow these steps.

** This post only relates to fiction. I can’t speak on non-fiction or poetry or anything else. The motormouth in me would very much like to, but I’d be making things up.

Tall, Dark and Handsome. Size 0 Supermodel. Hot? Meh. Not So Much.

2009-01-31T08:25:00.000-06:00

I’m not what you’d call a fan of Jessica Simpson. I think her music is garbage. I think that the reality show she did with Nick Lachey was an embarrassing pile of excrement. I think she’s a curse on the Cowboys. And her acting — Lord, I’ve seen porn stars take better stage direction. So, I was kind of surprised to find how defensive I was on her behalf recently when everyone from Fox News to Perez Hilton blasted her for having gained a few pounds. For calling her a moo cow and worse. It made me bristle at these sideline spectators for criticizing a woman who, while clearly not a rocket scientist or an Oscar contender, is an objectively beautiful woman. Even with a bit more meat on them bones. Even if she were to add a whole lot more meat on them bones.

Why on earth is Simpson’s size news? Who cares? Does her public identification with beauty entitle society to dog on her for gaining weight? Even when it’s so much more forgiving of an actress like, say, Kate Winslet, whose primary worth is in her thespian skills and not her Good-God-She’s-Gorgeous-ness? Apparently, Simpson’s “lost” a bit of what made her famous in the first place. And unfortunately for her, hotness is a quality that we, as a generally non-hot society, revile publicly and covet secretly. Which is perhaps why her having “lost”* some of it gives us fodder and permission to revel in collective Schadenfreude. And to be disappointed by it. It’s that incongruous duality, plus, perhaps, an extension of self — of projecting our own wants onto an individual— that causes commentators to grab onto nonsense like her increasing, leather pants-clad assage and call it current events. Why they excoriate her so viciously. So gleefully.

I don’t know. It may just be that people are shit.

But all of this made me think of physical beauty. And its more interesting cousin, physical attraction. What makes a person beautiful? What makes a person desirable? Can these qualities be measured? Be plotted on a graph and scientifically determined? Pick up a book, and chances are that the heroine will be pretty at the very least, described as beautiful or striking or some synonym to that effect. Its hero, more often than not, will be tall, dark and handsome. The hot guy that the cute heroine will fall for. Why? Well — because. I mean, let’s be real. Physical beauty is currency. It’s power. It’s a doorway to opportunities otherwise foreclosed. It’s forgiveness amplified. Leniency commodified. It sells. It attracts. This is America. That’s how it works.

But it’s also incredibly boring. To me, at least. And because this is my blog, I get to talk about what I think is attractive. And I’ll tell you, it has nothing to do with how one’s features line up on the face. Or how chiseled one’s abs are. Frankly, I couldn’t care less. What I do care about — what I notice right away — is how a person’s smile will light up a room, how it will change the air instantly. It’s what drew me to my husband in the first place, what made him absolutely arresting even though he’s short and fat and has terrible taste in clothes. I notice the way a person moves, the confidence and purpose and economy of her steps. I notice the merriment in one’s eyes, the friendliness of a wink, the warmth of a look. I gravitate immensely and immediately toward a hearty laugh, one that conveys in all of its magnanimousness how much a person delights in the funny. And if someone can make me laugh, that right there is 95% — the embodiment of intelligence and mental quickness and cleverness and the ability to pinpoint the absurd. It’s the intrinsic nature of a person that I find so appealing, one’s generosity of spirit and heart, his or her empathy and kindness. Her talent and ambition and ability and drive, his easygoingness and affection and desire to be a better human being. It’s all of these things that make the outside completely irrelevant. And completely beautiful. Take some of these qualities away, and I’ll never find that person attractive.

So, to Jessica Simpson, who I still think is a not-so-great singer or actor or shoe designer or comedian, who I will likely mock in the future for the idiot things that you say and do, take heart that you are nonetheless a beautiful woman, not because of what you look like, but because of the kind things you do, the caring words you utter, the empathy you show for others. No matter how much weight you gain.

* I put “lost” in quotes because I reject wholesale that a woman larger than a size 00 can’t be beautiful or hot or gorgeous or anything else. And I don’t agree that a woman who is a size 00 is disgusting or necessarily skeletal or worthy of contempt, either. She may just be small. An elf, say.

Insomnia—Oh, Sleep, One Day, I Will Find You and Make You Mine. Or Maybe Not.

2009-01-28T20:33:00.002-06:00

I once read a magazine questionnaire where the interviewer asked random celebrities how they sleep. Some answered with what they wear to bed — the fluffy flannels and sexy nothings and bedazzled eye masks and whatnot. Others shared their rituals pre-sleep — yoga, meditation, Bible-reading, drinking a full glass of water (really?) and so on. My favorite answer, though, came from Tom Ford, who said that he lays in his bed, awake for six hours, and then gets up. Now, I love Tom Ford for a number of reasons (as the creative director for Gucci, he made the brand awesome again; he’s got a brilliant line of his own now; he’s ridiculously easy to ogle). But his response made me like him even more because I was so acutely able to identify with his answer. So much so, in fact, that I would’ve become a fan of his had I not already been, based on that one quality alone.

On average, I sleep about three hours a night. Often, I sleep less. A lot less. And when the moon goes blue or when Hell’s temperature dips a degree, I sleep more (I couldn’t tell you the last time I slept a full eight hours). That’s not to say that I’m up and about and putting words to my Work-In-Progress or drafting brilliant legal briefs or even catching up on this blog. No, I’m in bed in the pitch dark, letting my mind spin. Day job, family, the WIP, TV shows, current events, what I’m going to wear tomorrow, what we need for the house, the inexplicable popularity of Rachael Ray and overextension of Ryan Secrest, the Supreme Court Justices, in descending order of judicial conservativeness…

Absurd, isn’t it? My husband often asks why I can’t just shut it down for the night and think about things tomorrow in the shower or at work or on the toilet like a normal human bean. Why I can’t focus on sleep with the same intensity as I have for the thousand goals I tend to during the day. Frankly, I don’t know why. Maybe it’s stress or worry or simply the fact that I come from a family of non-sleepers. Maybe it’s a curse that afflicts some of us the same way that diabetes or hypertension or male pattern baldness smites others.

What I do know is that the effects of lack of sleep aren’t that far off from those of drunkenness. That my reflexes are too slow when they shouldn’t be; that they overcompensate and accelerate when a situation requires a steady hand. I know that my emotional antennae perk into overdrive, causing a moderately humorous situation to feel like hilarity on crank, or a nominally disappointing moment to feel like hopeless despondency. I know that unexpected kindness breaks my heart as violently as an unkind word does, that frustration might as well be the same thing as anger, and anger jealousy.

Or my senses shut down altogether, slow time and space so that I feel lethargic and apathetic. So that I feel like a spectator in this game of life, given a front seat to the happenings around me, even as they involve me. If you’ve ever suffered from insomnia, maybe you know what I’m talking about, this detachment that allows you to see everything, but not permit you to react or respond. This notion that you’ll tuck everything away and ponder them at three a.m. with a bit more clarity, only to find that you can’t make sense of it then. That you’re too busy wondering if you’re starting to go insane.

It’s horrible, this inability to sleep. One for which I’ve not yet found a remedy (believe me, I’ve tried. Tylenol PM. Benadryl. NyQuil. Chamomile. Valerian. Tryptopham. A little bit of bourbon. A lot of bit of bourbon. First Chronicles. Second Chronicles. Combos of all of the above. For reasons I won’t go into, I really don’t want to try prescription drugs).

But here’s the kicker. For all the crap that is insomnia — and it would be a huge disservice to ever discount its nefariousness — I don’t really mind it. I’ve gotten used to it, I suppose. Or maybe I’m eternally optimistic, a perpetual ball of Sonshine as a lot of my friends call me, able to see the positive aspects of it. I appreciate the visceral nature of hypersensitivity. The tools that it provides to feed the emotions of my novels, the words and scenes that paint in detail exactly what my characters are going through. The empathy necessary to give a character depth and substance and a real emotive quality. And in the same vein of that sunny optimism, I find that for every one negative, overly dramatic event I experience, I find at least twenty-five silly things to delight and bask and revel in. Maybe it’s why I’m constantly laughing. And why my writing, which often deals with serious subjects, has a whole hell of a lot of funny in it.

Which leads me to my final point. And perhaps the most important one. Sleep deprivation imparts a strange freedom, the “I’m so tired, I don’t give a shit” kind of attitude that allows me to write as if no one is watching. As if no one is judging. I can let my story go the way it was meant to, on instinct and intuition and the gut impression I had from the start. For me, there’s something dissatisfying about a novel that is too careful, too formulaic, too afraid to offend, one that an author might have drafted with her editors and publishers and audience in mind. Not that I’m immune to these, of course. And I certainly don’t mean that I’m uninterested in my audience. But there’s an authenticity inherent in abject honesty, and with authenticity comes the natural ability to identify with the writing, with the characters and their situations. It’s that connection, I think, that causes me to remember books years after I've read them, to recall how a particular made-up person felt so real. How a figment of an author’s imagination was able to transform my perspective, and perhaps my life.

Hell, to be able to do that — yeah, I’ll take a sleepless night or two. I'll even take ten thousand.

What Are You Looking at? Are You Writing About Me?

2008-12-03T19:53:00.000-06:00

The other day, a group of my friends and I went to lunch, and at the table next to us, a woman was sitting alone, looking around the restaurant. She dug furiously into her bag, checked her cell phone, clearly agitated, looked around again, checked her phone, looked, checked, looked. My friends may have noticed her, but if they did, they didn’t comment on her behavior. They were too busy talking about the drunken weekends they had all had. But I kept sneaking glances at our neighbor. What was she doing? Was she waiting for someone? If so, who? Her husband? Were they in the middle of a nasty divorce and his tardiness was the reason for their relational demise? Was she about to be interviewed for a new job while taking a lunch break from her current one? Was she the first to show up to a blind date? Why was she so angry? Was she just an unpleasant shrew? Or did she have reason to be upset? To anyone else, she might have just been a harried patron, starved to hypoglycemic irritation. But to me, she was a story, a character with hidden motivations and goals, which were clearly being stymied. And as I turned to my friends and added my own snarky comments about debauched parties and office politics, I realized that I did the same thing with them as I did the woman. I noticed their inflections, their tilts of the head, the way they used their hands to emphasize the funnier parts of their stories. I absorbed the way they laughed or snorted, how their eyes sparkled or reflected prismatic colors in the sunlight. I took in what they were wearing, how one kept adjusting the collar of her shirt and how another scrunched her never-will-be-wavy hair. And I listened to their stories, the content and details of what had transpired on their Saturday nights, but perhaps with less ridiculousness than the version they were then giving.

As a person, I’m naturally perceptive, I think. I’m quick to pick up on someone’s mood, on the fleeting looks she might give another to relay her dismay or bewilderment. I’m also fairly introspective, and will keep events and conversations in mind for a long time, often rolling them through my head repeatedly like movie scenes so that I can layer them with my observations. I linger over these things because relationships—human interactions in all their levity and curiosities—arrest me. What goes on inside a person’s head fascinates me. It’s because of these interests that I write character-driven fiction instead of mysteries or horror (and also because I spook too easily to write those genres). And when I’m in the middle of a draft, I find that these qualities kick into high gear, sometimes rendering me hypersensitive. Or at least I feel as though I’m overanalyzing everything, not just in my writing, but in life in general. I don’t know if other writers experience the same heightening of his or her senses, if a horror novelist starts to see evil lurking in the mundane. At some point, I have to stop myself from thinking that every comment or email or silence is indicative of anything more than the face value of it. That sometimes, a statement is merely the product of impulse, that unresponsiveness is the result of distraction. Why do I do attribute meaning to everything when clearly not everything carries it? It may be because in a book, there are no wasted scenes. Or insignificant dialogue. Or haphazard action. Novels are the grand distillations of life, the collection of conversations and events placed specifically to move the story forward. And through these lenses, everything in the world garners import, deserved or not. Some people call that insight. Others may call it obsessive-compulsive disorder. But it’s where I draw my inspiration, the myriad possibilities why a person acts the way she does, why she says certain things, why she looks the way she does. And so I watch. And listen. And try not to look like a freakish stalker as I absorb the kernels of the everyday that may ultimately drive an entire book.

So there you have it. Yes, I may very well be looking at you, and yes, I may be writing about you, too. But it’s because you are endlessly fascinating, a relentless source of inspiration and potential that feeds my imagination. And at the end of the day, there’s nothing more a writer can ask for.

Come On—Let Me Give You a Hug and Tell You that You’re the Shiznit

2008-11-23T20:29:00.002-06:00

I’m something of an affectionate person. Smile at me, and I’ll smile back. Wave, and I’ll return the gesture. Give me a hug, and I’ll just about smother you with my exuberance. I tend to touch people on the arm when talking to them, and I have no problems squeezing into a crowded couch (or onto a friend’s lap for that matter) at parties. More often than not, my personal emails are filled with emoticons and exclamation marks, and depending on the recipient, my work emails are, too. I’m quick to tell someone that I think she’s the shiznit, am quicker to tell her that I love her, and for every snarky comment I make, I’ll rattle off three sincere compliments (I’m pretty sure that’s the ratio). I like to give little gifts to my friends just because, and I’ll leave smiley face-ridden notes in my husband’s car because it’s Tuesday. In other words, I’m terribly—perhaps irritatingly—expressive. Pretty much all the time.

I didn’t use to be, though. Or at least not as effusively so. For sure, I grew up in a rather non-stereotypical Asian family, and my parents have always been generous with their “I love you”s, hugs and pet names. But they also have their culturally archetypical attitudes, and they prize discretion as a virtue. So much so that by the time I left home for college, I couldn’t imagine telling someone that I adored him or her unless I knew exactly how said person felt about me. And was sure that the sentiment would be reciprocal. Likewise, I wasn’t about to tell someone that he or she was awesome just because the thought occurred to me at that moment. Part of the reason for my hesitation—and perhaps for my parents, too—stemmed from pride and the balance of power that emotional vulnerability can tilt against my favor. Another reason was the assumption that I’d have future opportunities to express how I felt, that some things were best saved for special occasions so that they were rendered more precious by their rarity. After all, how much do we treasure a grumbled “good job” from a jerk boss who never exalts his minions? And how much do we value the “you complete me” from a significant other who’s maddeningly stingy with his thoughts?

My attitude changed a few years ago. Doctors discovered a golf ball-sized tumor in my cousin’s brain. Surgery was risky, they said, but inaction was deadly. So they excised the bugger, leaving behind remnants so that they wouldn’t nick his gray matter. He was in his twenties. He survived, but he’s going to have to spend the rest of his life monitoring the tumor and have it removed again when it grows dangerously large. Which, if I am to believe the neurosurgeons, it will. And each operation will bring bated breaths and clenched fists for both him and his family members who won’t know if he’s being whisked into the OR for the last time. Three months later, one of my husband’s close friends found out that she had a tumor on the base of her brain stem. She went to the hospital. And died two days later. She was thirty-six. A month later, my husband’s grandmother passed away. So did my father-in-law’s best friend. For the next year, we started to believe that brain tumors were going to grip us all, that death was hungry and lurking for the unexpecting at every corner. With each announcement of yet another horrible disease and another passing, I heard so many regrets from family and friends, so many statements like, “I should have told him more often how much I loved him. I should have told him what a wonderful person he was.” The more I heard comments like these, the more I felt like I was watching an awful after school special with its sickeningly axiomatic message. And the angrier I became. What kind of bullshit was this, everyone having held back their feelings for who knows what reason? As for my own reticence, was the fear of appearing uncouth really preventing me from expressing how I felt about others? Was I so afraid that my expression might not be reciprocated? What occasion was “special” enough to warrant what we should be telling each other every day? And the answer I kept coming to was, “Who cares if you appear unladylike? Or if the person doesn’t reciprocate? If it means something to you, for God’s sake, just say it.” So I do. Almost as often as I think it.

I think about Clueless every now and then. It’s one of my all-time favorite movies (and a surprising source of life lessons). In it is a scene where Christian asks Cher whether he should keep the leather jacket he just bought. Her response, in all of its teenaged, California glory: “Carpe diem. You looked hot it!” I like that for so many reasons. More than anything, though, I love her attitude toward the seemingly trivial. Why worry if you’re going to end up looking like James Dean or Jason Priestly? Do it anyway. Say it. Express it. Carpe Diem, indeed.

Now, let me give you that hug. Because you, my friend—and if you’re reading this and made it all the way to the bottom, then you are my friend—are the shiznit.

Writing? Life? How Hard Can It Be?

2008-11-20T20:02:00.001-06:00

Some years ago, my husband and I were lounging around in the family room of our first home, which was wood-paneled in a hideous shade of Eighties dirty dirt brown. We’d been living there for over three years and had complained every day about how dated the house was, and that Saturday morning, I suggested that we strip the walls and restain them with a more genteel mahogany (because nothing says warm and inviting like dark, cave-like walls). “How hard can it be?” I asked. “I bet we can knock this baby out in a weekend.” Cheered by my optimism, my husband and I ran to Home Depot, were advised that varnish was the best solution to remove wood stain, bought two gallons of the poison and then went home, excited to renovate the three hundred square foot room. Two hours later, we both had massive headaches and were completely disoriented from the fumes, and this was after we’d opened every window in the house. The varnish didn’t work, and to our dismay, we now had a gaping section of lighter dirty dirt brown wall. We couldn’t restain the wall to the original color because we had no idea what it was, and we couldn’t add another stain over the original hue. So, we decided to paint the entire room a Pottery Barn pale yellow, which was perfect, considering that our family room was page 59 of the catalog (interior design is neither of our fortes). We returned to Home Depot, selected the color, bought five gallons of paint, and then went for Round Two, to which I said, “How hard can this be? I bet we can knock this baby out by the end of the weekend.”

Three weeks later, we were almost finished.

Six weeks later, the room was beautiful.

It took forever to paint because the room was twelve feet high with an obscene amount of wainscoting, picture framing and crown molding. It also took forever because both of us were working thirteen hours a day and were painting whenever we weren’t at the office. One would think that I’d learned my lesson in timing. But several months later, a friend of ours asked us to help him move. And as I am now notoriously known to do, I asked, “How hard can it be? I bet we can knock this out in three hours.” Of course, we didn’t.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always had a cheerfully confident—and borderline delusional—outlook on projects and goals. And I’d always harbored a desire to write, even when I majored in Biology and French, when I pursued a medical career, when I went to law school, and then when I worked at a law firm. The one passion that nagged at me constantly, I put aside in favor of “real life.” Then one morning, I was sitting cross-legged on the floor of a Barnes & Noble, reading a book, and I thought, “I’ve wanted to do this for so long. What am I waiting for? I mean, how hard can it be?”

So I did it. Got a laptop and started writing. And discovered that it was damned hard to write a novel. And that it was even harder to become published. But I kept at it until I finished my first book. And I kept at it when it didn’t sell. I kept at it when my days had become so long that I couldn’t tell when one ended and the next started. But like the family room, I couldn’t stop writing. For every “I don’t think I can do this anymore” thought I had, I had two of, “but I still love it.” I took a step back and listened to my environment, to the complaints my friends had about their own career trajectories. I discovered that we were all in the same boat, wondering how our lives had turned out the way they had when our passions were elsewhere. We talked about it so much that it became the backbone of OFF THE MENU, that conflict of living up to everyone’s expectations while hiding the love of our existences. And because it was so close to my heart, the subject grew organically into an entire novel.

After several iterations, the book sold to NAL/Penguin. I was nearly manic with joy. I don’t have children, but I imagine that the exuberance I felt is not unlike childbirth, when one forgets the pain and hardship and difficulties and long nights and debilitating self-doubt the very instant her agent says those magic words—“they love it. They want to buy it.”

So that’s the lesson we can all take away from my experience. It wasn’t because I’m so awesome (oh, how I wish I were) that I was able to make it in an insanely difficult industry. It was that I continued writing, even when it seemed like everyone in the world was saying “no.” And I kept at it, even when I knew just how slim my chances of publication were. I love the movie Galaxy Quest, and as a rather unfunny joke, I often wander around the house, saying, “Never give up. Never surrender” (in full Mathesar nasally inflection). But it’s become my motto of sorts. That, and my litigator’s philosophy of, “I will take your ‘no’ to mean that you are open to further negotiations.” But it got me to where I am. And now, I feel like I’m living my dream. I’m working on my second novel on nights and weekends and holidays (I still have a day job that takes up a good bit of my time). And as I muddle my way through the manuscript, often wondering if it’s any good, if it even makes any sense, I find myself saying what I’ve always said: “Come on Christine, you can do it. I mean, how hard can it be?"

Publishing Is a Bit Like Shopping at Abercrombie & Fitch. Really.

2008-10-26T17:51:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago, I ditched work early, went to the mall and sat on the floor of a mammoth Barnes & Noble for three hours, reading a pile of books that I eventually cradled in my arms like a paper baby, hauled to the cash register and bought. I had told my husband that I’d take care of dinner, and across from the B&N is a Cheesecake Factory, so I placed an order for an inhuman amount of food (which, of course, I would claim to have cooked from scratch), was told that the wait would be half an hour and then wandered around the mall instead of returning to the bookstore, where I’d likely lose myself in another three-hour reverie. Now, unlike most women I know, I despise shopping and am not afraid to admit that I’m mildly terrified of bustling, sale-crazed crowds. At the same time, I was on a quest for some kick-ass fitting jeans (aren’t we all?), which might be the only item of clothing I can’t buy with a click of a mouse. So, what do I do? Go to the two stores where I get all of my clothes? Of course not. That would be too easy. Instead, I gawk at what has apparently become a nightclub in the middle of Suburbia, Texas.

It’s been a long, long time since I stepped foot in an Abercrombie & Fitch, and while I was aware that the company had revamped its image in the last fifteen years, I wasn’t quite expecting this. Gale force exertions of a fragrance akin to Drakkar Noir. Gut-thumping bass. And this was even before I entered the store. Which I did. Why, I couldn’t tell you. Maybe it was curiosity. Or disbelief. Who knows.

If I thought that the stench outside of the store was overbearing, then the inside of it was beyond breathable. The house music drowned out my gasping and eventual choking. Which wouldn’t have caused alarm anyway because no one seemed to work there. Or maybe they did. I couldn’t see them in the pitch blackness. Racks of stuff bumped into each other, making free movement impossible. And while I waited for my eyes to adjust, all while feeling enormously ridiculous with my overstuffed B&N bag, I spied jeans. An entire wall stacked from floor to ceiling with jeans. All of them sizes 00, 0, 2 and 4. Clearly, A&F is catering to the prepubescent. Which, for better or worse, is how I’m shaped. So, I grabbed as many pairs as I could and tried them on. What wash or color they were, I couldn’t tell in the dimness. And if I passed out while fumbling in the changing room, for sure no one would ever discover me. But here’s the kicker—despite the lack of lighting, despite the air filled with what can only be described as douchebaggery, despite the complete dearth of customer assistance, the jeans fit. Miraculously so. And that excitement—that notion that I wouldn’t have to trudge around the outlet malls (“What size are you?” “Irregular, apparently.”) thrilled me to death. I bought all of them.

So, what in the world does this have to do with publishing? Well, in so many ways, my road to publishing felt like my quest for jeans, and as I bumbled about the store, I kept thinking about its similarities to getting OFF THE MENU published. The industry is, intentionally or not, designed to intimidate a writer so that she questions whether she even wants to try. And when she finally shores up the courage to give writing a go, a thousand obstacles block her path. Want to write fiction? You need an agent. Want to get one? Well, most of them don’t want you. One wants you? Well, editors don’t. One of them does? Guess what, the editorial board doesn’t. The editorial board likes you? Huh, the publisher doesn’t. And so on, ad infinitum. After a while, it’s hard not to take rejection personally, to feel like a failure when you’ve poured everything you’ve got into a novel. It’s suffocating, too, not unlike the fragrance A&F apparently can’t get enough of, the yearning of publication when no one seems to be there, the feeling that you’re wandering around blind. But at the end, I did walk into the store, I did try on jeans, I did find some that fit me. And so it is with publishing. Try, try, try. And try again. Because there’s a word for someone who never gives up—published. And there’s a word for fitting jeans—readers. For whom I’m enormously grateful.

Show and Tell

2008-09-12T20:19:00.002-05:00

By nature, I’m a very verbal person (no, you don’t say!). Wonder how I’m feeling? I’ll tell you, sometimes in patience-exhausting detail. Want to know what I think? I’ll blurt it before you ask. Words are my primary form of communication, whether in spoken or written form. It’s why I’m a litigator. And a writer. They’re perfect vehicles for reasoned expression and absurd fantasy, and while the former stokes my inclination for bluntness (“I know that we’ve only just met, but I totally love you!”), the latter indulges my creative side (“But you’re a fairy god, and I’m a minotaur. How will this ever work?”). I’m endlessly fascinated by the things people say, the stories they tell, the jokes they make. And while I may forget an acquaintance’s name or even what she looks like, more likely than not, I’ll remember what she said.

So, it’s a bit of a challenge when I encounter people who aren't verbal creatures, when I have to deal with those whose predominant form of communication are body language and facial expressions and actions and other non-verbal cues. One of my college roommates was the perfect example of this. She was a lovely girl, kind and thoughtful, but verbose, she was not. If she was happy, she might walk a little faster, smile a little wider. If she was sad, she might shuffle and purse her lips. And if she was pissed off at me, she would slam a cabinet door while giving me a death stare before stomping into her bedroom. She wasn’t mute, of course, but only once in a blue moon would she tell me why she was feeling the way she was, or what I had done to irritate her so. In so many ways, her behavior was absolutely maddening. But it also attuned me to watch her reactions to gauge what she was thinking, to be more sensitive to her demeanor to understand the reasons for her emotions. She didn’t have to tell me what was going on with her. She showed me.

Which is better — conveying one’s thoughts through chatty stories or emoting through action? In real life, they’re both vital, and they’re both effective. They both have the power to delight and to overwhelm and to charm and to frustrate. But one is never purely one or the other. A person would be completely one-dimensional if she were.

Fiction, on the other hand (and by definition) is the opposite of real life. Or at least, the conveyance of it is. Everyone in the industry has heard the following at least a million times—“Don’t tell me, for God’s sake. Show me. Show me, show me, show me.” And every writer I know — including me — struggles with the nefarious “showing versus telling” dilemma. How much exposition can a reader take before she starts to skip pages? Or even worse, to throw the book into the trash? How much internal monologue can I set to paper before I exasperate her and lose her interest? In a huge sense, it’s a question of pacing, of delivering information through action and dialogue, of imparting a tone through the same. It’s a matter of describing the background environment so that we can see it, of moving the character toward her goal, of giving her speech that rings true to her character. Of creating verbal pictures instead of staid documents. It’s extraordinarily difficult, and it becomes even more difficult when I think about it too much. So instead, I try to remember how my college roommate’s face scrunched up and turned beet red, how she balled her fists into white knots, how her lithe body stiffened with outrage before slicing through the air toward me in slow motion. And with little difficulty, I recall her opening her Elmo-esque mouth and stating with surprisingly thunderous power, “Christine, when I came home last night, I totally bruised myself walking into the couch again. Would it be too much to ask that you not rearrange the living room furniture every damned day?”

Sometimes, I’m glad that she wasn’t so verbal.

Facebook

2008-09-04T19:55:00.002-05:00

Back in law school, I was at a bar, and a total douchebag sat on a stool next to me and shouted his conversation to his similarly predisposed buddies. Over the course of the night, I discovered that he was in a band, that he was about to “tour,” and several other factoids that I’ve since forgotten. But I still remember that he uttered three sentences that I swore would never cross my lips:

○ “Man, last night I was so wasted that I…[insert douchebag comment].”
○ “Yo, dawg, who’s your publicist?”
○ “Dude, I’m part of an online networking site that has totally changed my life.”

Fast forward almost ten years. To my mild disgust, I’ve said all three (although usually without the “man,” “dawg,” and “dude”) and can pretty much bet that I’ll say them again in the future. I’ll skip the first one (I mean, really, who hasn’t said that?). The second, I’ll get to in a minute. The third is what I want to talk about. I’m not sure that I’d go so far as to say that an online networking site—in my case, Facebook—has totally changed my life, but I know that it has broadened it significantly. Before I started writing, and even after my book had sold, I never considered getting a Facebook page. I didn’t know a soul who had one, and all of my friends felt too old to learn what the Internets had to offer. It was the cliché of clichés of prejudices—FB was unfamiliar, and we were too ignorant to give it a go. So, it became that thing, that generation-defining eccentricity that had ensnared young people (okay, I’m only 32, but there are so many times when I feel like an old 32. I mean, come on, I love soft foods that don’t require teeth. It’s just a matter of time before I’m leaving the house in a housedress to yell at the kids to get off my lawn).

Then, my publicists said that I had to get a FB page. It’s marketing, they said. It’s effective. Please. Just. Do. It. So, I did. With great trepidation. I filled out my profile info and added my headshot. And then I waited, wondering what it meant to poke people, to super poke people, to write on each other’s walls, and to engage in the thousand other bizarre, Japanese-game-show like applications that came with it. A list of suggested friends appeared in a column, inviting me to invite them to be my friend. I didn’t know any of them. And it seemed to me that if I invited strangers to be my friends, they would likely say, um, no, loser who’s destined to eat soft foods and yell at her neighbor’s kids, I don’t know you. Who wants to be rejected online when the non-cyberspace world is already chock full of rejection? Then a sweetheart from work added me to his friends, which took away the pressure that I’d be alone on FB, sad that the cool kids hadn’t invited me to sit at their lunch table. And then another kind soul invited me. And then another. Soon, I started inviting people to be my friends, and now, I’ve got an overwhelming number of friends who are constantly updating their statuses, posting pictures and links, super poking and writing on each other’s walls.

Well, as it turns out—FB kind of did change my life. Or at least my perspective anyway. A large number of my FB friends are writers themselves. They’re successful, multiply published authors. Or they’re struggling to find an agent. They’re serious non-fiction creatures. Or witty, comic playwrights. Wherever they are in their careers, they’ve been uniformly and incredibly encouraging and thoughtful and uplifting and inspiring and funny and everything I value in a person. They’ve written me heartbreakingly kind notes in an industry that is anything but, compelled me to do the same for them. And over the past six months or so, I got to know them so that they’re no longer fuzzy ideas of people, but my real friends. What’s even crazier is that they shrunk my perception of the publishing world from a vast ocean into a very small pond, and in a true game of Six Degrees of Separation (or in this case, only one or two degrees), it seems that everyone in the writing community knows everyone else. Including me. And the knowledge that there are people who understand exactly what I'm going through — that I’m not alone in this erstwhile solitary journey — is the reason I plan to stay on FB.

P.S. I said that I’d come back to the publicists part. Indeedy, I have two—one in-house, the other independent. They are a vital, vital part of the book world, and, I’m happy to say, also my very dear friends. I know that I’m ultimately a product, an ISBN number who’d do best to run in the black, but I also know that my publicists care for me as a person, too. And in the end, isn’t that what we all want?

P.P.S. So, I’ve come to discover that many of my pre-FB friends aren’t the Luddites that I thought they were. They’ve got their own FB pages, and the number of applications they’ve got running is proof that they’ve broadened their notions on communication and relationships. And in an age when time and geography can wreak havoc on rapports, I’ve found that we can all connect on this wonderful place called the Web. Maybe I won’t be sucking pudding through a straw and terrorizing my neighbors anytime soon.

Just Be Yourself

2008-09-03T04:23:00.001-05:00

This post is for my writer peeps who are just starting out with the craft. It’s also for my non-writer peeps who wonder why I sometimes stare blankly into space.

I’m in the middle of revising my new novel, and as I write and rewrite and rewrite again, I’ve been wringing my hands over showing versus telling, the reader’s patience for internal monologue, diction and most importantly, whether a character’s words or actions ring true — that is, whether her dialogue and actions sound like something she would say or do (by the way, I’m going to use the pronoun “she,” but it applies to boys, too. I’m just too lazy to use “he or she” constantly). And in the middle of struggling with all of the above, particularly the latter, I thought of a comment that a reader who knows me made about OFF THE MENU: “Christine, I love how I can hear your voice in your book.” Which made me think of voices in general. What does it mean, to have a voice in a novel? It’s so amorphous, like saying that one’s food has soul, or that a face has character. What exactly, is voice?

I think at the heart of the matter is a defining characteristic, or a set of defining characteristics that immediately identify a writer. I can describe friends as having certain traits because for the most part, they’re consistent. Friend A is quiet, kind and perceptive, and minus an atypical bar brawl, she is always those things. Friend B is caustically witty and unabashedly lascivious, and apart from an introspective moment or two, he is always those things. Those, by way of analogy, are their voices, and if you were to give me a quote from one of them and then ask me who said it, I should be able to tell you. So it is with writers and our voices. It’s the way we convey a message. The tone we use. The effect of our sentence structure, length and verbage. It’s how I can tell Nick Hornby apart from say, Jeffrey Eugenides, Ann Patchett from Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez. All fabulous writers with their own distinct voices.

So, why am I talking about voice? One, because this is my blog and I get to talk about whatever I feel like (ha!). But two, because recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about whether my voice is getting lost in my WIP, if the way I’m piecing the work together sounds like me. It’s an odd exercise, which I’m trying to keep in check for fear of going insane (“Does this sound like me? Does this sound like me? Who am I? What am I?”). I’ve also been thinking a lot about a couple of people I deal with on a regular basis, people who are incomprehensible to me because, for forced use of analogy, their voices are off. And after some time considering why this is (hence, the staring into space), I think the reason is because they’re trying to be other people. They’re embodying who they think we want them to be. Or who they think they ought to be. It’s not unlike the themes of OFF THE MENU, except instead of pursuing activities that fulfill everyone’s expectations, they’re changing their personalities to do so. And the result is a confusing mess that leaves me with either the wrong impression of them, or none at all. Which is likely the last thing they were striving for.

So, what’s one to do? Well, if you’ve read this far into the post, then maybe you’ve figured out why I’ve titled it, “Just Be Yourself.” It’s kind of become my philosophy as of late. Whether you’re witty, dry, boring, super serious, mousy, a Star Trek-TNG enthusiast (anyone else but me?), a dance freak—whatever—just be it and not some poor simulacrum of something else (exception: if you’re an asshole or douchebag, I would suggest that perhaps you do try being something else). Because if you’re not, the only thing people end up taking away is inauthenticity. And that takes me back to my characters, for whose dialogue and actions I keep gauging against who they are as people. It also takes me back to my own voice, which has to be my very own. And at the end of the day, what it is is what it is when I’m not trying so damned hard.

A Day in the Life of Me

2008-09-02T04:56:00.002-05:00

Since people found out that I’m a writer, they’ve been asking me a lot of questions — how did you do it? What made you want to write? Is such-and-such character based on so-and-so? How are you still working a day job? Which almost always leads to the question, What does a typical day look like for you? And to my astonishment, a number of people want to know what it’s like in excruciating detail. Why, exactly, I’m not sure. Maybe they’re curious about how much time is involved in writing a book to see if they can pull it off, too (we’re all closet writers, aren’t we?). Maybe they’re wondering if there’s a secret to time management. Maybe they’re simply inquisitive. Maybe one day, I should ask. If I had to guess though, I think that a lot of people simply share my own draw to a quick trip into someone’s life and head, which is why I love the Proust Questionnaires in Vanity Fair and the Pivot questions that James Lipton asks his guests at the end of Inside the Actor’s Studio. Some time ago, there was an article in Time magazine that showcased what ten families from ten different countries ate for dinner, pictures and all. I was obscenely fascinated. So, in celebration of curiosity and unadulterated narcissism, here’s what my writing days (let’s do weekdays) usually look like, give or take an errand, happy hour, nervous breakdown or two:

4 a.m. — Open eyes two hours before the alarm clock goes off. Sometimes, it’s 3:30. I don’t know why God has given me a Circadian rhythm like this. Get up, make a cereal bowl-sized cup of coffee, get on my computer, answer emails (I always, always do, if you’re wondering if yours will get a reply), play a few games of Spider Solitaire, fiddle with Facebook, listen to music (I’ve been on a Massive Attack streak as of late), read CNN, MSN, Fox News, NY Times, The Superficial, Perez Hilton and The Onion to see what’s going on in the world. By 4:30, I’m ready to roll on either my Work-In-Progress or revisions, depending on where I am in the process.

6:20 a.m. — Shower, fix face, figure out what to wear to work work, curse misbehaving hair.

7 a.m. — Wake up snoring husband, kiss him goodbye, leave for work work. Thank the sweet baby Jesus that my commute isn’t what it was when I was at the firm.

7:30 a.m.- 5:30 p.m. — or later. Or earlier. Try not to screw up too badly as an in-house lawyer. Defend The Man against lawsuits and other nefarious happenings.

6 p.m.-7 p.m. — back at home. If husband is there, debate what to do for dinner (“What do you want to eat?” “I don’t know.” “What do you want to eat?” “I don’t know.” Repeat for next 15 minutes).

7:01 p.m.-10:30 p.m. — write, play on FB, play Spider Solitaire and music, respond to work emails if important, eat if dinner vacillation has taken longer than usual.

11 p.m. — write if creative juices are still flowing (Internet will be shut down at this point so as not to attract my goldfish-esque attention). If not flowing, as is often the case, then catch up on all the TV we’ve DVR’d and fret over word glut and deadlines.

Sometime after that — go to bed. Consider ramifications of a single REM cycle on memory and sanity.

So, there you have it. Weekends are about the same, but without the day job, and every once in a blue moon, I'll conk out for an embarrassingly, possibly worrisome, long time (somewhere between 5 and 14 hours). Now, before you think that I have no friends and that my husband is about to file divorce papers for spousal abandonment, I do have friends, and I’ve been reassured that no proceedings are about to take place. Lucky for me, my friends and husband have about as much going on in their own lives. Lucky for them, I’m pretty good about knowing when to shut down the maddening, obsessive hole-myself-up-in-my-office-like-a-hibernating-bear mode and spend time with them. If there’s an event that’s important to them, I’m there. If they need me to lend an ear, I’m there. If my husband just wants to lounge on the couch for a while and watch TV with me, I’m there. My days are long for a purpose that’s extraordinarily important to me, but I also know that at the end of the day, it’s all for nothing if I can’t share it with the people that matter most.

Until the next one!

What in the World Have I Done?

2008-09-01T06:50:00.002-05:00

Happy Labor Day, all! It's been way too long since I've posted, and this Labor Day, I'm making a resolution to post more frequently. I have loads of topics that I want to talk about, but not enough time! (oh, to be able to stop time so that I can write more). So, while I get my act together, edit my Work-In-Progress (what a mess that is), think about fun topics such as Facebook, generational gaps, the use (or overuse) of exclamation marks (which goes back to the generational thing) and so on, I thought I'd post a blog that I had written as a guest for other blogs. Enjoy!

. . . .

Writing is wonderful. Magical, even. With words, one can create imaginary worlds. Can delve deep into a character’s head. Can render a fictional scene from a true event that had gone horribly awry in real life. Writing can result in delicious, popcorn entertainment. And it can move a reader so that she recognizes that what she’s experiencing is art in its purest form. I love writing. I obsess over it. And in hindsight, I love even the difficult bits of the process, the word glut-filled nights when I think that my novel-in-process will never go anywhere. I love how writing makes me feel, how it opens up my perspective and makes me more empathetic. As isolating as the exercise of writing can be, it’s also a strangely humanizing activity, one that makes me feel more connected to the rest of the world.

Publishing, on the other hand, is another bag altogether. It’s a business that’s hideously generous with rejections. Hideous, as in having something like a 99% rejection rate for fiction writers. With those kinds of odds, I’m much better off at a craps table in Vegas. Still, I was foolhardy enough — and, like most writers, unreasonably optimistic — to think that I might creep into that glorious one percent. And after years of work, no sleep, a two-foot stack of rejection letters and a divine miracle, I did. My first novel, OFF THE MENU, sold to Penguin, and I celebrated as if I had just won Powerball. I celebrated as if I had achieved something better than winning Powerball because I had. My husband jumped up and down for joy. Literally. My friends congratulated me and told me that I was awesome. My coworkers (unfortunately, I have an arduous day job) gawked at me enviously. Life was good. It was better than good.

Fast-forward thirteen months to eight weeks before publication. My publicist told me that my first book signing was going to be August 15th, and suddenly, I felt exactly the way I’d made my characters in OFF THE MENU, which is to say that I was gripped by paralyzing fear. After all, it’s one thing to hide away at home and write, to have my baby safely within my grasp. It’s a different thing entirely to have that work out in the public where everyone can see it. I kept thinking, what in the world have I done? What had possessed me to push so hard to get my book before an audience that might judge? What if my friends laughed at me? Or worse, thought I was a hack? A fraud? The self doubt that was plaguing me was made worse by the fact that everyone was telling me to laud myself, a characteristic that my Korean parents — who had adopted genteel Texas sensibilities — had spent their entire lives telling me not to do. It’s unseemly, they said. Terribly uncouth. And yet, as an author, I have to sell myself. I know that. I knew it even when I was praying that a publisher would notice me. And still I went for it. And still I was terrified when everyone was telling me that I should be nothing but thrilled.

Of course, I am thrilled that OFF THE MENU’s out on bookshelves now. But I’m still anxious and nervous and all the other nail-biting emotions that go along with having such a personal piece of me out there. Maybe all authors feel this way. After all, we want our readers to enjoy our books. To feel like they can escape from the real world for a few hours. To feel uplifted and inspired and entertained. In a way, having my novel in the public is like hosting a party. I want everyone to be happy and taken care of. And if that’s why I push myself so hard to make my second book better than the first, and the third better than them all, then maybe this anxiety isn’t such a bad thing.

Post script: I feel much better now that the signing's over, but the nerves are still there. Maybe they'll always be. But that's okay.

Yes, it CAN happen!

2008-08-07T19:26:00.000-05:00

My debut novel, OFF THE MENU, hit bookshelves on August 5th, and recently, a bunch of people have been asking me how I went about getting published. The short answer? By keeping my chin — and optimism — up even though I was receiving stacks of rejections every day. The long answer takes me back to a Facebook question I answered for my profile, which called for my most embarrassing moment. Unfortunately, my life is riddled with heinously embarrassing moments, and one of them occurred at a writers conference I attended in the mountains of California, where I met my agent. I’d been invited to an industry cocktail party out of the graciousness of one of the conference’s board members, and being an unpublished writer who was desperate to make a good impression, I researched the guest list, which included dozens of publishers and agents. This was my chance to wow them, I thought. And maybe snag an agent. So, I perfected my pitch. Practiced my smile. Wore a cute outfit. As ready as I’d ever be, I showed up at the party, determined and excited. And it would have been a great party had I managed to stay upright for more than thirty minutes. I can’t say what exactly caused what happened next — the high altitude, perhaps, or maybe low blood sugar, or the single sip of wine in my system — but in front of God and everyone who mattered in publishing, I fainted. As in, hit the floor face first. With my wine glass still in hand. I don’t recall the fall, but a number of revelers told me afterwards that I then did a pushup before a couple of concerned hosts helped me to a chair, brought me water, and then guided me back to my room, where I spent the rest of the night horrified and cringing. I’d never fainted before, and of all the times in the world to pass out, I couldn’t believe that my body had chosen that moment to try it out. I wrung my hands (literally), sure that I’d forever blown my chances to find an agent. I worried that publishers would think that I was a jackass at best, and a liability at worst. I fretted all night, wishing that I could turn back time and praying that there might be at least a few attendees who hadn’t witnessed my complete lack of grace. Alas, everyone heard about the fainting girl in the darling ruffled shirt.

The next morning, I spent some time apologizing to people I recognized from the night before, and my pitiful conversation with a striking woman turned into a long one about the troubles with thin mountain air, me and my book. She asked me to send her the first chapter of it, which I did as soon as I returned to Dallas, and three days later, she called to request the rest of it. The next week, she signed me on, made me change a few things in the manuscript, and then sent it out to a bunch of publishers. It went nowhere. But I began writing what would become OFF THE MENU, and after a number of rewrites, it sold to Penguin.

So, there you have it in a nutshell as to how I went about getting published. I worked really, really hard, wrote during every free second I had, learned the industry, went to several writers conferences, attended a cocktail party and then passed out. I guess the road to publishing is a bit like that — a mix of preparation and luck. It’s incredibly labor intensive, and sometimes, what seems like the worst thing in the world ends up becoming the best. Because the kicker of it all is that my agent would never have noticed me had I not caused a ruckus at the cocktail party.

You can read more about me at http://www.christineson.com/.