The Best of 2009: Article

[I'm participating in Gwen Bell's Best of 2009 Blog Challenge, in case you're all like, what's with the theme?]

Article. What’s an article that you read that blew you away? That you shared with all your friends. That you Delicious’d and reference throughout the year.

This article from the Wall Street Journal, “How to Write a Great Novel,” blew my mind. And it continues to blow my mind. I’m a writer. I write. It’s what I do. And most of my writing is for pay; there was a time when the opposite was true. But over the last few years I’ve experienced an embarrassingly crippling case of writer’s block. It has lifted occasionally, here and there, but it’s always come back. So much so, that at some point I wondered if I should just stop calling myself a writer. After all, a writer writes. And I was doing no such thing.  I liked to joke that I felt bad for the main characters in a couple of my short stories; one had been stuck in his hotel room and the other on his deck for four years.  And it wasn’t for a lack of trying. I just didn’t have it in me, or the words wanted nothing to do with me, or the planets had aligned wrong, or who knows what. But it was hideous, in that non-life-threatening sort of vacuum inside which these things occur.

Over the last few months I’ve undertaken a lot of reframing, perspective-shifting, boundary-stretching and other uncomfortable activities. Somewhere along the line, I decided to take a crack at my favorite unfinished story. I decided to change one minor detail about a secondary character, and–absurdly, miraculously–the story fell into place. Boom! Just like that. Within twenty minutes it was done.  And I’d realized (I could feel it!) the block was gone. Writing had lifted its ban on me. I had been allowed back into the club.

(One detail. One detail belonging to a secondary character. That was all it had taken. That felt a little freaky to me.)

Well, then I found the article. And as I read about the freaky methods that all these highly respected writers (one of my own favorites, Michael Ondaatje, among them) employ to get the words out of their souls and onto the page, I realized that all along I’d assumed I was doing it wrong, somehow. That I was being foolish or half-assed about it. That a real writer wouldn’t be so blocked, so terrified, so awkward at going about her business. And I had been wrong.

I’m still smiling about that.

The Best of 2009: Restaurant Moment

[I'm participating in Gwen Bell's Best of 2009 Blog Challenge, in case you're all like, what's with the theme?]

July 8. My 34th birthday. I’ve just had my hair done.  I’m dressed like me, which is different from how I was dressed last year on my birthday, when I was in corporate drag. My mother and I meet at my favorite restaurant*.  It is a girls’ lunch par excellance; we have serious talk and fun talk and hushed-tones talk and laughing-so-hard-we-don’t-care-if-we’re-kicked-out talk. But we don’t get kicked out. We have delicious food and wine. Our waiter loves us and brings us the dessert tray and I choose the creme au chocolat. I bring the spoon to my mouth and, quite literally, blush. It’s that good.

Oh, I say. And then I have some more.

*That’s Zazou, in Redondo Beach, in case you need a treat. Ignore the horrid music that cues up as the page loads!

The Best of 2009: Trip

What was the best trip of 2009? This one. Hands down.

Carpet Treatment, Red Variety

I’ve been talking about the Oscars a lot lately — namely, that I want to attend them one of these years — and something my friend Dyana said reminded me of this post (from my previous blog), which is not about the Oscars, but the Golden Globes. Anyway, thinking of it made me laugh, and I thought you might enjoy reading it.

Thoughts on the Golden Globes

The Neil Finn Show of Heartbreak (or, Largo Is Lame)

On the plus side:

• I got to spend time with my good friend Hector
• We went to a fantastic restaurant/bar with tacos so good they made me nostalgic
• Neil played a couple of my favorites that I’ve never heard him do live

Not bad.

On the minus side:

• Because we were told before the show that — surprise! — there would be an aftershow in the tiny, 50-seater venue across the courtyard, and it would be first-come, first-serve, we didn’t stick around for the encore. Neil’s encores tend to be awesome. But we went and made sure we’d have spots inside the tiny wee intimate amazing aftershow.
• We coughed up another $15, which were exchanged for drink tickets, and went and found a spot right in front of the stage. Then we thought it best to cash our drink tickets in immediately, so as not to get up during the show.
• They stopped letting people in. And then the door guy announced that Neil was exhausted and would not be playing after all.
• Since I’d traded my tickets for a glass of wine and a bottle of beer (which was, naturally, handed to me sans bottlecap), I was told I wouldn’t get my $15 back.
• BUT! I would be put on the list for Tuesday night’s aftershow! Provided I shelled out money for another ticket, of course, since I only had a ticket to Monday’s show.
• Margaret Cho was, rather inexplicably, hanging out in the bar alone, glaring at everyone.
• We left the venue and returned to my car…which now proudly bore on its windshield  a $55 parking ticket.

Really bad. Really, really disappointing. If you’ve ever taken a look at “The List” up there in my nav bar, you’ll have seen that one of the items on there is “Sing onstage with Neil Finn”–so you can imagine how much closer I thought I was to that experience. (He’s quite audience-friendly and given to granting requests.) To be fair, his exhaustion was evident from the moment he took the stage — and anyway, it’s hard to fault someone with a 20+ year track record of giving the stage his all.  He’ll be back in LA at some point, and I’ll try again. But man, Largo should have had the decency to refund my money, especially considering that most of the other people in there (and there were only maybe 20 of us) did have tickets for Tuesday’s show, and weren’t losing anything in the deal.

Man. Man! What a rotten deal. As the great Nina Simone sang: It Be’s That Way Sometimes.

Photo by wonker.