#owenabbott

[trixclibrarian]

owenabbott replied to your post: “stupid shitty priveleged white lady makes an excellent shitty...”:

which book?

HRC’s “What Happened”

[trixclibrarian]

thank you

<3

at least it turns out all the koi (all 14 we thought were eaten by a crane) did not perish. the predator only ate 3 of the 14 and the remaining 11 hid deep in a pipe at the back of the pond. mike put the net back on and when the lily pads came up they started coming out again. 

[midnightvalkyrie]

owenabbott answered your question “So is anyone doing Nano this year? After last year’s failed attempt...”

I attempt and fail every year

*high-five*

Maybe? Hopefully? this year will be different???

[demonprincex]

owenabbott said: Find the first novel of a great author you respect. If your favorite author is dead, hir publisher probably published a terrible rough draft/first manuscript in a shameless cash grab, and it will be terrible. This is inspiration.

Cosigned 100%. When I was still a David Foster Wallace obsessive, I remember reading Broom of the System and feeling so, so...gratified! It wasn't a great book! You could see all the gears and the glue, and hear the haste in which it was written! The same thing with early Barth. Or Jennifer Egan. 

But not Toni Morrison. Fuck she started off strong and kept going. 

[aclockworkplum]

How are you doing? I can't think of anything else to ask

I'm doing much better than I have been. Work had me incredibly stressed out, but that's starting to get taken care of! Thanks for asking. :)

[mikeverett]

My Writing Process (one of a million)

originally posted on mikeverett.com

“My Writing Process” is an ongoing series in which authors “tag” each other to answer some questions about their work.

Bud Smith tagged me. He’s real swell guy, and I look forward to publishing my book “Memoirs of a Homeless Bookstore Owner” with him through Unknown Press in May!

So far I’ve read about a million of these “My Writing Process” pieces, and they all bring something a lil different to the table. You should check some others out. I’m tagging Erika Price and Owen Abbott, so definitely stay tuned for whatever they have to say!

1) What am I working on?

I’m currently in the dreaming-and-hoping phase of my third novel (going on eight months and 6,000 words now). I think I’ve settled on the title “The Poet’s Handbook of Modern Witchcraft.” It’s about a former aspiring writer adjusting to life after urban homelessness and failed dreams. She’s accepted an ordinary job at an ordinary grocery store in her home town, only discover that during her absence, the town has been overrun with poetry gangs. See excerpt at the bottom of this post. 

I’m also working on cleaning up some poetry I wrote while I myself was homeless. At the time, I simply wrote down just about every thought that crossed my mind, and due to the psychological effects of the stress of my circumstances, a lot of it wasn’t very coherent. But other parts have a certain resonance. It was all very specific stuff. I’m trying to clean it up and turn it into something somebody might want to publish as a chapbook.

Today, I’m working on a couple different short stories. They are submissions for Kleft Jaw and Uno Kudo, respectively. They both take place at a grocery store, because that’s where I work.

And, of course, I edit for Kleft Jaw Press. This mostly means sorting through anthology submissions and helping to clean them up, but along with the talented Lindsey Thomas,I’m also editing “i am hopscotch without hop” by the fantastic Ryder Collins.

I also run Syntactics, a literary development and Open Mic group, with Kacy Crider andRyan Harrell.

And, of course, I am eternally promoting my last two novels, “Memoirs of a Homeless Bookstore Owner” and “Turtle: The American Contrition of Franz Ferdinand.”

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?

First I gotta figure out what genre I belong to. My writing has been described as both regionalist and semi-autographical, and I think both of those things spring from the fact that, as Mary McCarthy said, I am putting real plums in an imaginary cake. Most of my characters are based on real people, they live in cities where I have lived, and many of them have jobs that I personally have worked.

I’m not sure that my writing is much different than that of other writers of this genre, except that I have had different experiences than them. There are many, many people who write about ordinary people in the extraordinary situation that is trying to survive in contemporary America. They all are empathetic works, and the good ones aren’t too wallowy. I like this genre because I feel like it helps us– just human beings in general– connect to one another and understand people who are in situations that aren’t our own. There’s people of all races and genders and national origins that write these stories, and people that don’t have a race or a gender or a nation to call their own, and the disabled and terminally ill and incarcerated and lottery winners and Children of Deaf Adults and former neo-nazis and former Jehovah’s Wittnesses and former Atheists and addicts and travelers and single parents and preschool teachers and just all kinds of people. We all have something a little different to bring to the table, something a little different to add to the literary conversation about making it.

3) Why do I write what I do?

If the Mary McCarthy quote is the ‘how’ of what I write, then this Aurora Killpoet quote is the ‘why’: “It’s okay. We’re all fucked up somehow, but that’s not the only thing we have in common.”

I also like to say that people never do things that don’t make sense, and if someone does something that doesn’t make sense, it’s because you don’t know the context. I write context.

4) How does my writing process work?

For a long time I tried to have a writing process. For about six months I worked as a ‘freelance writer and editor,’ which really just means I was unemployed. I had a tidy schedule. I would wake up early and write a poem first thing. Then I would work on any current editing projects. Then I would scour e-lance for any freelance editing and writing projects. From 11 till 2 I picked at my lunch and tried to write tedious articles about wedding venues in Atlanta, Georgia or the latest model of remote-controlled vehicles. That was a desperate and painful time. Then I would spend two or three hours scheduling tweets and Facebook posts, just generally trying to network with other writers and pimp the hell out of myself on the internet, and managing my submissions to approximately every single literary journal I followed on Twitter. Then after my daughter went to bed in the evening, I would time myself and work for two hours on my novel. I rarely accomplished anything in those two hours.

This was a crap writing process and it didn’t work at all. I do not recommend it. The only way to write anything meaningful, in my opinion, is to be too busy to write. It’s a horrid, horrid paradox. I churned out my last novel while working 60-hour weeks, split between a jewelry store and my bookstore, while living in an RV with no electricity in a Wal-Mart parking lot. My first book was finally finished, after six years of writing and revisions, while I was chronically ill with lupus, going to school full-time, instructing Logic part-time, and parenting two children.

Literature is a conversation and it can’t exist in a vacuum. Most of my poems I wrote those scheduled mornings were about the stale cinnamon role in my fridge and the pale morning light on my empty kitchen table. They were all pretty bad– not terribly written, but meaningless– and imparted an air of loneliness that was too vague and too complacent to be desperate. Nothing ever moved in any of my poems. They were all the written equivalent of a still life painting, boring vain vanitas. They were great practice in form, sure. But they were only exercises. As art, they are meaningless.

Perhaps some are capable of writing professionally all day long, but I am not. Because I was doing nothing but writing, I had nothing to write about but writing. I had nothing, really, to contribute to the conversation. I had my past experiences, sure, but no current context for them.

My writing process these days is a function of my job. I find that good, hard, menial labor is best. In the winter I stock shampoo, razors, condoms, and baby formula at a local grocery store. In the summer I run the garden center at the same grocery store, unloading heavy carts and caring for the plants. Most of this work requires zero cognizant presence, unlike the dreary hell of Customer Service, and I am free to come up with stories and poetry in my head all day long. Plus I like the Andy Warhol-esque repetition of the grocery store. That aesthetic usually translates into the stuff I write these days. What I am not free to do, usually, is write the stories. My hands are full but my mind is free. When I come home I might get a chance to type something up, if I haven’t forgotten it. Sometimes that happens (the forgetting). But usually I fall asleep fast, or if I’m not too tired I might take a shower.

Bud Smith tagged me in this Writing Process series on March 30th, almost a month ago. I’ve been thinking about it since then. I came up with some parts of it while sorting the condoms out from the pacifiers, and parts of it while dead-heading petunias. I haven’t gotten to sit down and write it until just now. And still, I had to write it over the course of a day, in between dropping my daughter off at pre-school and picking up a prescription and stopping to bold every name I wish people would look up (hint, hint). That happens with most of the things I write. Everything ferments for quite a while before it gets done, and when it does finally get done, it’s not all at once. I forget some good phraseology I come up with, and that’s frustrating, but I also get to edit things a million times in my head before I finally write them down. It’s the same process I used to write poetry while I was homeless. I would often find myself lost in thought, in line at the soup kitchen or trying desperately to fall asleep on the ground in 30-degree weather, and I would turn a handful of words over and over again in my head, picking out the ones that didn’t quite fit and trying out new ones instead, and by the time I finally had a chance to sit at a computer, my work, whatever it was, was already several drafts in.

I don’t schedule a time of day for writing poems any more, but I do have to force myself to find time to write. It’s necessary and the only thing that makes the I-only-write-meaningful-stuff-when-I’m-too-busy-to-write model work. Because otherwise, you find yourself trying to churn out a short on your last day off before the submissions deadlines for your favorite anthology. And it’s not easy, because after moving 1,500 pounds in steel carts up the slight incline of a grocery store parking lot, I barely have energy to pay the bills and feed my daughter. But you gotta squeeze in time. Bud Smith, for example, touts his lunch-break typing-on-the-iPhone method. Others, I know, stay up way too late. That one’s never worked for me. But I squeeze it in, bit by bit. And once I have a story or a poem, I find that the being busy has paid off.

It’s not perfect, but that’s my process.

An excerpt from “The Poet’s Handbook of Modern Witchcraft.”

Campbell leaned against the door frame and sighed. “They’re not, like, different factions. That makes them sound way more political than they are.”

“They are pretty political,” Rita chimed in. “I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the members are on the terrorist watch list.”

“You could never call the Blue Muse political. Not by any stretch of the imagination.”

“Yeah, I know, but, like, some of them are into that anarcho-industrial bullshit. Fatherless Children and Chickenbones.”

“But they’re not like, you know, political factions.”

“They’re not cults either.”

“They’re kind of like cults.”

“They’re not religious.”

“They’re kind of religious.”

Imogen drew her eyebrows together. It probably wasn’t long before Campbell threw his sandwich at Rita, if things panned out the way they usually did. Imogen didn’t mind that though. “What are they?”

“They’re got like, you know, their own systems of loyalty markers and association markers.” Campbell ripped a bite off of his turkey-on-rye.

“Initiation rituals and naming rituals.”

“Publication rituals.” (said around a mouthful of turkey)

“Genre allocation.”

“Turf allocation.”

“They’ve pretty much taken over the market for propanolol and Biotene.”

“And other spoken-word-related substances.”

“They’ve got their own nomenclature, their own symbolisms.”

“You should see the wars over performance venues and publishing spaces.” Here the remainder of the sandwich was finally thrown.

“They’re, you know, poetry gangs,” Rita said, ducking the rye crust.

[demonprincex]

What's your favorite neurotic selfish female character?: response

owenabbott: 

Natalie Portman’s character in “Black Swan.”  She’s cracking under pressure. She’s obsessive about perfection. The creepy instructor uses her. She is sexually frustrated. The world silences her at every turn. She’s trying to be what everyone else in her world wants her to be. There is a ‘yellow wallpaper’ kind of subplot, except it’s her mother that locks her up, rather than her husband, which is interesting role-reversal. She was a very human character, and you can’t help but empathize with her. I felt it also did a lot more to outline the sexism and gender-expectations prevalent in society than any screenplay focusing on a strong female character ever has. 

I love this example! She's sympathetic, but so vulnerable and weak-willed that she never pulls herself out of her situation (which makes her pretty unvirtuous, as a character). And she's neurotic as hell, of course. 

Anyone else?