On being realistic

I had to take my car into the shop the other morning and ended up riding the No. 1 bus downtown to work, instead of my usual, numbing underground train route. The crowded bus ride ( for without fail, the No. 1 bus is always crowded) over Nob Hill and through Chinatown brought me back to when I first moved to San Francisco 11 years ago. I used to live on the dodgy downward slope of Nob Hill, and I often rode that bus to work. Some days — sunny days — I walked, because I could not believe I lived in such a place. The Edwardian architecture, the glimpses of sparkling blue between the blocks, the squeals of the cable car and the calls of merchants in Chinatown selling their wares —  my living here felt impossible and dreamlike.

The other day, when I pushed my way into the packed aisle I remembered the smell of that bus, and I suppose it was the olfactory memory that made me pensive. It took me a few moments to identify the sharp tang of ginseng. When the smell became recognizable, I longed to write the sentence: The bus smelled of ginseng. And then I had an epiphany of sorts: I should be writing about San Francisco. Why am I not writing about San Francisco?

The novel/stories I have been writing for the past year take place in the Maryland/Washington DC area. They take place in two different time periods, neither of which is the present. Why am I making things so hard on myself? is what I thought as I clutched the handstrap and the bus lurched over Nob Hill to the financial district. We passed Grace Cathedral and its maze for walking meditation. We passed the dinginess of the Stockton Tunnel, and the fruit markets along the sidewalk on the edge of Chinatown, with their makeshift cardboard signs all in Chinese. I wanted to get out and look, and to write. (Alas, I had to get to work.)

Now of all times, I thought, when I am juggling work and being a parent and on any given day who knows what other obligations, I should be writing about this place, about the present, or at least a not-so-distant past that I have lived through and remember. I should not be writing about a place that’s a 6-hour plane ride away, that I don’t get to visit freely for research because whenever I am there I am also tending to a 2-year-old who does not have any interest in long car rides and visits to libraries. I should not be writing about a time period that requires a lot of research, research that my local public library cannot help me with, because its historical collection is focused on the West Coast, not the East. I should not be writing about a place that is so small and obscure that detailed research requires buying books that are out of print or are $45 and only come in hardback.

It’s almost as if I set out to make writing a book as hard as I possibly could.

It’s almost as if I’ve set myself up to fail, on purpose.

Why am I trying to prevent myself from writing a novel? is what I thought as I watched an elderly Chinese man struggle to the door of the bus with his cane, a ball of plastic bags in his free hand that would later be filled with fresh produce and perhaps steam buns or ginseng root. Next to him sat a well-dressed blonde, texting someone named Fletcher on her iPhone, and while thoughts about writing and self-defeatist behavior rushed about in my head I was conscious of an affection for these people on the bus, for these characters I know.

A few posts back, I mentioned an article in which an LA Times TV critic offers her 10-step guide to being a working mother and writing a novel. No. 10 on her list? Realistic expectations.

 10. Realistic expectations. I suppose there is someone out there who could write the Great American Novel while working full time and raising three kids, but I’m not her. My two books are Hollywood mysteries, which I didn’t have to research because I have written about the industry for years. I think they are very good books, well-written and fun to read, but they aren’t going to win a Pulitzer. That will have to wait until the kids head to college.

That is perhaps the scariest of McNamara’s suggestions. If you are a perfectionist, as many writers consider themselves to be, this is some hard advice to swallow. But there’s something to be said for being realistic, for making things easier on yourself. After all, writing a book is hard enough without putting unnecessary obstacles in your path.

Every day I write the book.

Or so sang Elvis Costello.* I cannot say the same.

The other day, Nichole Bernier tweeted a link to a year-old piece on the LA Times’ website, “A Working Mother’s Guide to Writing a Novel.”

Wow, did I feel ashamed after reading this piece.

I know, it doesn’t do to compare yourself to other writers who work in different, seemingly better ways. And by better, I mean, more productive. Comparisons only lead down a path of guilt, self-disgust, writer’s block, etc, etc.

But I digress.  This working mom, Mary McNamara, offered a list of 10 things that need to happen in order to successfully juggle work, motherhood, writing, and the rest of your life. (If indeed there is one.) The list is, I think, both motivational and sobering, and not just for writing moms and dads but for anyone who happens to be juggling other roles in their lives while attempting a writing career. Some of McNamara’s guidelines are fairly obvious: Have a laptop, for example, because you as a busy, working parent don’t have time to write longhand, then type it up, and you’ll be writing in various locations such as cafes, your kids’ ball games, the car, etc. Other suggestions are less obvious: Be discreet about what you are doing, because talking about writing a book and writing a book are completely different things.

The piece of advice that got me was this: “You have to write Every Single Day, and I mean it. Obviously there are exemptions for death and illness, but it’s like dieting or working out — if you start skipping one day or two, it’s all over.”

It’s not like I haven’t heard this advice before. Of course you have to write every day, is what I thought as I read the piece. And then I saw it. My inability to stick to writing every day had landed me where I am these days, which is, well… nowhere in particular. I have started a novel (or two?) and written several short stories in the past few months. Some of them I’ve completed, some of them I have not. In the past two months, I’ve written almost nothing, and have even lost track of what my most current project is/should be.

When I read McNamara’s advice I saw what my casual attitude of late with regard to writing has done to all aspects of my writing, the routine, the output, the quality of that output, and my motivation level.

It happens that I have recently resolved to get more exercise. My workout routine has gone much the way of my writing routine. I go to the gym once or twice in a week, then miss the next week, or multiple weeks. McNamara is right — skipping a day or two, or a week or two, means it’s all over. I have just as much trouble getting back to working out, and getting back to the fitness level I was in before, as I do getting back to my writing when I’ve been away from it.

So what’s the fix? I have grown accustomed to giving myself a lot of slack in recent months. And by slack, I mean making excuses. You’re doing the best you can, is what I frequently tell myself when I let my daily life take over my writing life or my workout routine.  You have a kid to take care of, a dog to walk, work to do, a relationship to maintain, dinner to cook, sleep to get, etc. etc. After reading that piece, and after trying to run at the gym for the first time in months, and after sitting down to write today and not being able to remember what project I was last working on, I see that I have not been doing the best that I can.

McNamara writes that she arranged with her husband to write at night, while he put the kids to bed. She cut out a lot of other activities. There are plenty of moments when I have been lounging about on the couch in the past few months (or years), in the evening, after my son has been put to bed, and I’ve been doing nothing in particular, which is to say, I’ve been watching TV and/or reading headlines and checking Facebook and Twitter on my iPhone. I have been telling myself, when my guilt about not writing or blogging or doing whatever else makes itself known, is that I am doing so many things during the day that I deserve these few hours of nothingness. In truth, some days I do need a bit of nothingness. But not every day. I could be writing during those times, is what I thought when I read McNamara’s article.

And so. I see now that writing every day involves breaking out of habits as much as developing new ones. It means snapping out of laziness and a cycle of excuses. And, toughest of all, it’s about being a hardass about making writing a priority, not something you can set aside because a preschool event has come up, or because you need to buy groceries, or because you feel like doing nothing instead. Writing, if you’re serious, is not a special hobby you get to when you’ve cleared your to-do list of everything else.

___

*Back in the day. The Charles and Diana aspect of this video seems baffling now, though no doubt in 1983 I thought it was great.

the other side of vacation

I recently wrapped up two weeks of travel on the East Coast. It was a busy two weeks, full of visits with family and friends, two states and the District of Columbia, beachgoing, old-fashioned fun on the boardwalk, good food, and a toddler who seemed to grow a couple of inches and begin speaking in sentences just in the time we were gone. Of course, there were also several flight delays (good times, with the aforementioned toddler in tow), traffic delays (a 2.5 hour trip to the beach that took, ahem, FIVE HOURS. Did I mention the toddler?), a day of torrential rain, and summer bug bites. In short, it was a vacation, with good and bad — but mostly good — adventures intertwined.

And now I’m back. Well, not just now. In fact I returned to San Francisco five days ago. The jet lag is gone, and I’ve caught up on laundry, phone calls, email, etc., etc., etc. Everything should be back to normal. Except that it’s not. I haven’t written a thing, despite having the time over the past two days to get back into it. This happens every time I take a trip or have a guest visiting me here. I don’t have the personal time to write while I’m traveling anymore (see above, re: toddler) and so when I’m away, I’m away from my writing. With all of the activity of visiting and traveling, I don’t even really think about my writing much. When relatives visit us here in SF, the same thing happens. They want to spend time with us, and we’re busy, and the writing schedule goes out the window.

And then I’m faced with an empty, where was I? feeling. And a blank, blank page. You would think that a vacation would leave me refreshed and full of ideas. It does, in a way. But I’ve come to dread this weird post-vacation interlude, the days in which I want to write, but can’t seem to turn my brain back to it. My stories, when I open the documents, feel foreign, and I can’t remember where I was going with them. I know that I have to trust that my brain will bring me back to wherever I was in my writing. I know that eventually, it always does. But in the intervening days (weeks? I hope not.) I find myself sitting down to write, and then getting back up again. I tell myself to “stay in the room” but in the next minute I’m downstairs making coffee, or on Facebook reading about friends’ activities.

I’m wondering if there are ways around this post-vacation dead time I seem to experience. I’m wondering what other people do to stay in the room, even when they can’t be in the room. What do you do? How do you keep up momentum when life gets in the way?

the writers’ conference experience

I began the week full of nervousness: at meeting new people, interacting with published authors, participating in a workshop for the first time in four years. On top of that there was the personal: anxiety about leaving my 20-month-old son at home with my husband and in-laws and guilt at being away from them all for six days. And there was the physical: I was exhausted after a few months in which my husband has been traveling a lot and working long hours, and I have been the primary parent. And there was my mood: It’s been foggy, gray, and cold in San Francisco all summer – not exactly uplifting.

Last Sunday I left my husband, son, and in-laws and drove out of the fog. I mean that literally —I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge into brightness and warmth and a California summer landscape full of fruit trees and vineyards and belted cows. But I also mean it figuratively: Within a day I felt my exhaustion fade, my mood brighten, and my enthusiasm about writing soar.

I spent the week meeting other similarly minded writers who are working hard on novels, poetry, short stories, and novellas; writers who have been toiling, unpublished, for years, and writers who’ve just begun their journeys. Some had MFAs, some did not. Some wrote for a living, and some had completely unrelated careers but have been writing, secretly, for years. We read each others’ work and we discussed our manuscripts with a thoughtfulness I had not been sure I could expect.

Most nights there were faculty readings scheduled, and we gathered in beautiful spaces at wineries and elsewhere to hear their poetry and fiction. There was an intensity to all of this that I had not expected, and that I felt sometimes overwhelmed by, but in the end appreciated. I did, after all, spend five straight days completely immersed in writing. Two hours of workshop a day, craft lectures, and readings. It was impossible, the rest of the time, not to think about books and writing – my own and others’. That time to think about writing was luxurious to me, both because I do not have the ability to spend that kind of uninterrupted time on writing at home, and because I did not realize how much I missed it.

If that weren’t enough, I received tremendous encouragement from a well-known author whose work I greatly admire, and from those in my workshop I’d just met. I suppose there is a right time in one’s writing life to attend a gathering like the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, and for me it couldn’t have come at a better one. For the most part I have been working alone, and being around a community of writers like that was inspiring and motivating. I came away with a writing plan, some much-needed confidence, and connections to a group of people I hope to keep in touch with. OK, and I got some sleep — a lot of sleep. I felt more rested than I have since before my son was born, which is not to be underestimated in so, so many ways.

I’m the windblown one chasing a kid and a dog.

I’ve been having trouble keeping up with this blog recently. It’s not because I don’t want to, it’s just that various domestic responsibilities have been ruling my life since mid-May. By that I mean, my husband has had to travel four out of the past five weeks for work, and I’ve been manning the fort, which leaves me with little time to write, not to mention exhausted. The combination of owning a dog in the city and taking care of a toddler alone is challenging. One or the other would be manageable, but both… (And I only have one kid! I know plenty of people manage with multiple kids and dogs, and I’m in awe.) Once, a friend asked me, “If you could do it over, would you still get the dog before you had the baby?” And I said, “Yes, but I’d have bought a house with a backyard.”

We’ve got a house with a deck, which is lovely, but leaves the dog with his legs crossed a lot of the time. So, picture it: 6:30 am, gusty winds and fog, 48 degrees, and I’m wrestling with Aaron at the dog park. (After wrestling him into some clothes, shoes, and a jacket at home and prying a container of Cheerios out of his hands in the car to much protestation.) Howie, our dog, is eager to hike around the park, and Aaron – Aaron wants to pick up rocks and say “windy” over and over. When I pick him up to catch up to the dog, he yells at me and fights to get back down. He has become too strong and heavy for me to hold when he’s struggling and my arms ache from trying to keep a grip on him. He refuses to hold my hand on steep rocky paths, but he’s not a capable enough walker to navigate the trail on his own. I am not fully caffeinated and my temper is easily piqued. I drop my sunglasses. I drop the dog’s leash. The wind blows my hair across my face. Howie runs ahead and keeps looking back at us, exasperated. His expression says, “Come on, people! Let’s go!” When it’s time to leave the park, Howie keeps running ahead so I can’t get his leash back on.

This, for the most part, is representative of my month. These battles have been taking place morning and afternoon for weeks. It’s funny, I read somewhere that dogs have the intellectual capacities of two-year-old humans, but not until I had a child did I see the similarities between the behavior of toddlers and mischievous dogs. Both Aaron and Howie refuse to look at me when they’ve done something wrong. Both run away when feeling playful and/or misbehaving, sometimes taking items of importance, as though they are committing poorly planned robberies. Both tend to jettison the items they are not supposed to have – Aaron, when he is caught with the forbidden, hurls said item away, as if to say, “I wasn’t touching that. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Howie opens his mouth to drop things that aren’t his and then looks away, as if he can’t see what I’m referring to. He also takes things (usually Aaron’s toys) and buries them in my flower beds, thus committing two three crimes at a time: taking something that isn’t his, ruining a flower bed, and tracking dirt in the house.

Both boy and dog are demanding when it comes to food: Aaron repeats the name of the food over and over, his voice escalating from excitement to whining to yelling and crying. (While my stress level increases proportionately.) When he wants dinner, Howie stares at me intently, then sighs and paces, then, if he still hasn’t been served, he paws at me, sits up and begs, and finally barks.

All of this is worth it of course, when Aaron says a new word, or beams at me, or laughs. Or when he says “Mama” with a certain tone of affection in his voice. And when Howie wags his tail and licks my hand, or when he bumps my hand with his nose to remind me he’s there.

The Lost Week

First, Aaron came down with a cold. Then, I came down with a cold. While still dealing with the cold, Aaron came down with a stomach virus. Then, that’s right —  I came down with the stomach virus. I spent the first few days of this week in the house with a sick kid, and the last few days in the house being sick myself. I’ve seen almost no one besides my husband and the aforementioned sick little boy. At the beginning of the week it was raining and cold. Today, the sun was out and in the brightness, I saw plum blossoms had begun to appear, little stars on bare branches. Daffodils are coming up all over the neighborhood.

How long have I been asleep?

That’s the way it felt, anyway. I seem to be on the mend, finally, after two days of nibbling on crackers, sipping apple juice, watching bad TV, and laying in bed. I cannot remember quite what my plans for this week originally had been. Appointments got canceled, chores went undone, and calls went unreturned. I know I had writing plans, but everything’s gone fuzzy. What was I even working on? I have not set foot in my office since last week, and on my desk are reminders of plans and ideas I had — an ad for a writing contest, a book of essays I’d been considering using as a model for … something, a printout of an old essay I’d thought about reworking. All those ideas look very far away, as if it’s been a month since I considered them. It’s only been a week. A lost week.

On “retired” writing

I’m sick now, too. I haven’t gotten used to this aspect of parenting yet: sicknesses that start in the youngest member of the household and then spread. I’m not really sure why it surprises me so; I spent last week wiping my son’s nose, cajoling him to eat, and squeezing a dropper of medicine into his mouth. He was miserable, and kept laying his head down on my lap, or my shoulder, wiping his nose and his mouth on my clothes. In his more playful moments, he tried to put his (no doubt germ-ridden) fingers in my mouth.

For some reason when I’m taking care of him, I feel invincible. Sort of. I’ve got 36 years worth of built-up immunity on him, right? At the same time, I washed my hands a lot last week. I suppose it was inevitable: By Friday night, my throat ached, and by Sunday evening I had all the symptoms my son had had a week earlier. My husband now has the sore throat, too, as does our childcare provider and the other family we share her with. My dog alone seems immune, and stares at me expectantly, waiting to go out, or for a meal, just like he always does.

I feel too sick to leave the house today, and have been trying to write, or at least think about writing, instead. Taking it easy does not exclude writing, or at least that’s what I’ve been trying to tell myself. But I’ve spent most of the day reading over old work. It started out innocently enough — I’ve been considering sending out an excerpt from my MFA thesis (again). It’s a chapter from the book that I turned into a stand-alone essay. I sent it out for a while just after completing my MFA and then I stopped. In fact, the essay was not badly received. I mean, I have a pile of rejections on my desk, but many of them are what I would describe as “nice” rejections — “no thanks, but please submit to us again” — those kind of rejections. I took the rejections harder than I should have.

At some point I put my book up on a shelf and I haven’t touched it in nearly two years. I mean that literally, though the electronic files are also gathering dust in the far corners of my hard drive. I put the printed pages in a special box, and I closed the lid. It sits on top of my office bookshelf, like a monument.

I decided somewhere along the way that the book was no good and that a couple of chapters, maybe, could be salvaged and sent out as stand-alone pieces. I suppose that what I’m getting at here relates back to my previous post, about editing and self-confidence. In my last post I wondered about how you ever know whether you’ve revised enough to send something out. Jade Park had a thoughtful post about rejection recently, in which she mentioned “retiring” a short story that got rejected “a kazillion” times. I wondered when reading that, how do we know when to “retire” a piece of writing?

And I’ve been wondering if “retirement” is permanent. I suspect not. I think that some pieces of writing need a lot of time to percolate. New life vantage points — age, relationships, jobs, etc. — can impact the way you see what you wrote at a different time in your life. An essay of mine that was published last year was one I wrote a first draft of in 1998. I rewrote it several times over the next decade, each time from a new vantage point, and eventually, it got somewhere. If you had asked me in 1998 whether that essay would ever be published, I would have laughed. I saw it — even five years later — as a novice attempt at writing. I saw it as practice.

Ten years is a long time. I read through most of my book today, for the first time in two years. It wasn’t as bad as I remembered. But also, the parts I have long seen as salvageable need more work than I thought. For now, the bulk of the 270 pages are going to stay retired. I suspect that sometimes the pieces we leave gathering virtual dust in our hard drives are pieces we’ve overedited, or gotten bored with, or that we know deep in our hearts were practice for something else, something better. This is what I want to think about my book.

In the midst of my son’s fever, coughing, and runny nose last week, he learned to walk. He took a couple of steps unaided, then fell on his knees and crawled. Later he tried again. And later, again. Three steps turned into five, and the next day he was toddling around our living room. He wobbled and lurched and he held his arms out in front, uncertain. But he was walking.

Writing is a lot like that.

Michael Chabon and altered writing routines

I used to wake up around 7am, grope my way downstairs, fumble with the light switch, and immediately set a kettle on the stove for coffee. I am not a morning person. I use a French press to make coffee, which arguably is not a non-morning-person’s coffee-making routine. (It requires a bit of patience for the water to boil and for the coffee to steep in the press and can result in a big mess if one presses the plunger down too quickly. There’s vigilance required, unlike when using a drip coffee maker, and vigilance is not something that people who need caffeine in order to see straight in the morning have in great supply. But I digress.) Anyway, while my coffee was steeping, I would toss a frozen bagel into the toaster oven. When it was toasted, the coffee was done. I carried my bagel and cream cheese and mug of steaming coffee upstairs, and sat down at my computer. While I ate, I surfed and read the news. When my plate was empty and coffee gone, I opened Word documents and began writing. Sometimes I wrote for several, blissful, caffeine-fueled hours. Sometimes I took a break to shower and get dressed, then cranked out more words. By late morning or early afternoon, I was ready to do something else, be it work, or school, or gym. My routine was, at least most of the time, an extremely satisfying and productive one.

That was all Before Baby. After my son was born my routine — writing and otherwise — has been all but decimated. For example: I began this post while he took an unexpectedly long mid-morning nap yesterday. I hoped to finish it during his second nap of the day, but he decided not to take a second nap of the day, and here I am finishing my post more than 24 hours later. Any writing time comes when I am least expecting it, and cannot be relied upon or predicted.

It was comforting to read on Jacket Copy this week author Michael Chabon’s honest description of how he struggles to maintain his writing routine while also being present for the best parts of the day with his children:

…my natural rhythm is to work at night, stay up late and to sleep late. I can get more writing done between midnight and 1 o’clock in the morning than at any other hour of the day.
Unfortunately, that schedule does not work at all well in a family with small children. If I sleep late, then I miss out on what I think is the nicest, most pleasurable time of the day, of an ordinary, everyday routine. In the morning — my kids are generally in a pretty good mood when they wake up, you know, we make breakfast. I hate missing out on that, so I get up. So that means I can’t really stay up as late as I might like. Or else I don’t get enough sleep. I struggle with the schedule. And I’ve been struggling with it for years.

I have always wondered how Chabon and his wife Ayelet Waldman, who is also a writer, manage to get anything written — they have four kids. And yet both are quite prolific. Chabon admits in the interview that he sometimes stays up too late, choosing to lose sleep in order to write. And he sometimes has to leave home altogether — a few days away to bang out as many words as he can at the time of day he works best. His wife, he says, does a better job of working efficiently during the hours the kids are in school.

I’m always fascinated by how different writers approach the work of writing, but it’s also interesting to consider the result of upending one’s writing routine, purposefully or no. Writing teachers and books on writing usually advise: Find a writing routine that works for you, and stick to it.

I wonder if some better advice might be: Learn to write at any time of day, even those you think might not be your best. Train yourself to be flexible. That’s life, after all, which is always threatening to interrupt even the most-adhered-to routine. And it’s not just having kids — it’s work, school, a significant other perhaps, or just a desire to get away from the computer for a few hours and enjoy some nice weather.

I’ve learned (and am still learning) the following over the past months of struggling to write in a new/unpredictable routine:

–  It’s less about what time of day works for your writing routine than it is about training your brain to think about writing and work creatively at times that it might not normally function that way. For me, this is the hardest part. When I had my early morning writing routine going, it wasn’t that I couldn’t write later in the day, but I found that the distractions of the day tended to intrude more; slow me down and trip me up. This is still the toughest thing for me to overcome, post-baby. In the 10-15 minutes before I started this post I ran through a long list of things I needed to get done while Aaron slept, mentally considered which ones could be put off (the dishes? a shower?), and then hustled through the things that absolutely had to get done (laundry). In the moment before I began writing I was still thinking about whether I had everything ready to go in my bag for when Aaron woke up and we went outside. I had to shut off all this kind of thinking to settle in and write. Some days the writing pushes itself to the front, and it’s easy. Some days, I can barely write a sentence before all those mental to-do lists reassert themselves.

-  Comparisons are creativity killers. I used to, on days when writing was frustratingly elusive, consider other writers’ situations, compare them to my own, and beat myself up over my lack of productivity. Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman were examples I thought about often. If this couple could be so prolific with four kids, why couldn’t I get a paragraph written with just one child to distract me? It’s easy to fall into this kind of thinking (especially if one is sleep-deprived and/or in a bad mood), but man, is it not helpful. Chabon’s interview is a reminder that it’s hard for everyone, even Pulitzer Prize-winning authors, to balance writing with other aspects of their lives. It’s important to keep perspective.

- Use some non-writing time to prepare for writing time, whenever it eventually presents itself. In the car, in the shower, and yes, I admit it, sometimes when I’m playing with my son, I have thought about pieces of writing and what I will do with them next. I have dreamed up new pieces of writing. In busy times, when it seems like I will never get to write again, this practice can serve as a reminder that I’m not writing, yes, but it is a way of making the most of my time in front of the computer when a writing session does eventually happen. Sometimes I keep a notebook nearby so that I can jot down ideas — I have a horrible memory — and that makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something, even when I haven’t written a full sentence for days.

-  Remember that you will have to re-learn all of these above regularly. It’s so easy to get caught up in the fact that there’s so much to do, or you haven’t had much sleep, or that you’ve only written for a half an hour this whole week, or that other writerly people you know seem to be banging out story after story, or a novel, or blogging more often than seems humanly possible, etc., etc., etc. The big picture is still there, it’s just a matter of stepping back to take in the full view.

new starts

Recently I went back through all of my old blog posts and recategorized them. You might wonder, “Geez, what the heck did you do that for?” for which I do not blame you one bit. I wondered that myself over the week or so it took me to recategorize 470 posts. It was quite tedious, not to mention carpal tunnel inducing.

Recategorize is, in fact, the wrong word. At some point after I killed my poor blog off over a year ago, I decided (probably in a pregnancy hormone-addled state) to delete all of the categories from Fog City Writer. It was not long after I decided to kill off FCW. (Which, by the way, I blame on the aforementioned pregnancy hormones.) Neither of these moves were good decisions. I liked my blog, however off track it seemed to be going at the time, and I liked blogging. As for the categories, they could have been organized better, but they weren’t that important, really.

The point is, I made the decision to stop blogging. And then I missed blogging. But due to the aforementioned pregnancy and various related conditions I will not bore you with here, and due to the subsequent result of said pregnancy, i.e. a cute little baby boy, I didn’t quite get around to bringing FCW back from the dead.

I’m trying to now.

And so, you may have noticed (are you still there, readerly people?) I’ve recently redesigned the blog. And, though you may not care, I recategorized all the old posts. (In fact it was a good exercise, going through all the old posts and revisiting the past, despite the tedium and the carpal tunnel flare-ups.) And then I added author tags, just because…well, perhaps a trait of mine that could gently be described as “detail oriented” got the better of me.

And here we are. Or here I am, anyway. I’m stumbling a bit as I try to re-establish a writing routine, post-baby.* I could go on and on about that, but it’s less than interesting. The point is, I’m trying to get FCW up and running again. I want to post regularly. Things get in the way quite a bit. Time management skills have fallen by the wayside. (No one informed me that having a baby causes a loss of time management skills. Everyone said the opposite: that a baby makes you more efficient and better able to juggle. Perhaps this is true and I am just juggling more things? Perhaps it’s only my perception of my time management skills that’s off. Right. Perhaps that is the subject of another post that I will not write due to its less-than-interesting-ness.) I begin posts and then am unable to find the time to finish them until a month has passed. Sometimes I begin posts and then forget about them, only to discover them and finish them after a month (or more) has passed.

I am desperately trying not to dwell on these missteps. I’m trying to begin again.

*Hello, giant, enormous understatement.

musings on a warm day

It’s a warm day in San Francisco. Days like these, in which San Franciscans normally clad in jeans and fitted jackets and scarves wrapped expertly around their necks are seen wearing shorts and sundresses and flip-flops, are becoming less and less rare here. I saw an article a few weeks ago that detailed some research that showed that California was having more hot and humid days per year than it ever has. I was not surprised. When I moved to SF nearly a decade ago it was a big deal on that one day a year that the temperature soared and un-air-conditioned apartments made sleeping nearly impossible. Since then I’ve noticed that the warm days and nights are coming with more frequency. The article directly connected the increased number of warm, humid days in California to changes in global climate patterns and ocean currents resulting from the warming of the planet.

But I digress.

I just read two books set in San Francisco, written by San Francisco-based writers. One was Andrew Sean Greer’s “The Story of a Marriage,” and the other was Michelle Richmond’s “No One You Know.” I really liked both, for different reasons, but reading two novels set in San Francisco back to back was an unexpectedly strange experience. One reason I read is to escape, and I felt, by the end of the second book, that I had not escaped at all. This was especially weird given that I read the first book while visiting relatives on the East Coast. It’s to the authors’ credit that San Francisco became so inescapable. They both rendered it – though in different time periods – very clearly and very much as I know (and love) it.

I think if I wrote a novel I would set it in San Francisco.

I’ve been thinking of taking a fiction writing workshop. You may know from previous posts that in the past I’ve been more of a nonfiction person. My MFA, in fact, was in nonfiction. But I have not been feeling much like writing the truth (oh, such a loaded phrase) the past couple of years. I’ve been slowly – and by slowly, I mean at a pace many would call excruciatingly painfully, laboriously slow – writing two short stories. I can’t seem to finish either one. I work on one and then the other. Sometimes months will go by in between these writing sessions. So I’m thinking of taking a fiction class. To step it up, speed things up, gain some motivation and to finish my stories.

I’m sure a fiction workshop – or any workshop, really, could do me some good, but. I’m reluctant. I suspect many former MFA students are reluctant to return to the workshop format. I know I was workshopped out by the time I finished my program. All that commentary in a group setting can be as overwhelming as it can be helpful. But my reluctance stems more from my continued attempts to balance new(ish) parenthood with writing.
The question is… can I wake up at 5 or 6 am on a daily basis with my son and manage to make it to — and through — an evening writing workshop that extends past my usual early (lame) bedtime? I suppose I’ll have to try it and see.

And also, coffee. Coffee is good.