on the wrong side of sunrise

Tag: blog stuff

There’s a bathroom on the right.

There’s a new category on the right end of the navigation bar up top. See it over there, “Teaching“? Yeah. It doesn’t have much content at the moment, but it will be developing over the next couple weeks as I put together my teaching portfolio. It will include, among other things, a syllabus for the ENG 104 courses I’ll be teaching next semester. When I first expressed anxieties about teaching, people told me, “But you’re so good at grammar! You’ll be great.” While it’s true that I know my way around comma rules, I’m still working on learning my way around the classroom—but I am learning and beginning to find the prospect of being in charge of a whole roomful of students a bit less preposterous.

In other news, a short story of mine was recently accepted by The Broken Plate for the 2014 issue. The story is called “Rest In Peace” and features an autobiographical moment of mondegreen—what Wikipedia explains as “the mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase as a result of near-homophony, in a way that gives it a new meaning.” Or, put more plainly, it’s the “bathroom on the right” effect:

The chorus actually goes …

Don’t go around tonight.
Well, it’s bound to take your life.
There’s a bad moon on the rise.

Alternatively, though, you might hear it as …

Don’t go around tonight.
Well, it’s bound to take your life.
There’s a bathroom on the right.

And hey, if that’s the version you prefer, more power to you. I won’t try to correct you—unless you neglect to set off that exclamatory “well” with a comma.

Readings are the worst thing ever, until you realize they aren’t.

When I was working with a professor to finalize my portfolio for grad school applications, she suggested I apply to read one of my pieces in the university’s Undergraduate Symposium in March. It was November at the time, and with my mind ensnared as it was in the application process, concepts like reading and Symposium and March seemed like abstractions, whereas something to list on your minimalist CV was all too real. I gave brief thought to the fact that I’m not very comfortable with that sort of thing, then submitted a proposal and went back to thinking about grad school.

January rolled around, and I got an email saying my proposal had been approved, but I was still too caught up hoping for other acceptances for it to really register. Then it got to be the weekend before the Symposium, and it suddenly occurred to me, in an uncomfortably real way, that I had to give a reading soon.

I get the sense I am not unique in my performance anxiety—after all, it combines the usual stress associated with sharing work with the stress of public speaking. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a perfect storm, because there are always ways to make it worse, but it’s a pretty damn good storm. We’ll call it 8.5/10.

So what do we, as writers, do? The reading is a potentially powerful medium for sharing our work … but also potentially disastrous, if we, for instance, become so nervous that we vomit on the podium. I don’t think there’s a single formula for success, but the first step is often to stop fixating on the possible nauseous disasters. Beyond that, it breaks down to being aware of your weaknesses and then doing those things better (a strategy that applies to most areas of writing, and life in general, thanks to its vagueness).

It helps to have someone who can act as a coach, or at least a one-person audience that doesn’t mind listening to you read the same paragraph over and over. For me, this came in the form of a more performance-savvy writer friend, who pointed out some of my bad habits and gave me some advice on how to remedy them, along with words of encouragement. Accept those words—this goes along with not thinking about the disasters. Don’t try to undercut or debunk encouragement. I am guilty of this, and it hasn’t made me any better off.

On a more general level, though, perhaps it would also help to read regularly. When you finish a draft of a story or chapter or scene or sentence, read it aloud. I sometimes do this to help catch mistakes, repetition, awkward structures, etc., but the actual reading element has always been secondary. In retrospect, I think those are missed opportunities to practice performance-grade reading, rather than mumbling through the lines under my breath. Cats make a pretty good trial audience, in that they let you practice coping with that sense that you’re reading to someone who has no interest in listening to you.

I survived, by the way, as have most reading-shy writers before me. If you’re curious, I read a version of “Confidentiality” cut essentially in half to fit the time limit. I don’t envy the people at Reader’s Digest, but that’s another matter entirely.

Bottom line is, reading for an audience is hard, and anyone who says it’s not is either lying or a sociopath (or maybe both). But it’s also a good thing. During the Q&A after I finished, I got very positive feedback, signs that people had enjoyed my work. I was even able to not-too-tackily-I-hope point them to this blog. Have I suddenly developed a huge, thriving fanclub? No. But I connected with people, at least for fifteen minutes, and maybe that will give me the opportunity to connect with them again. Plus I didn’t vomit even once.

Titular Troubles

Confession: I am not good at titles. I often give projects filler “titles” so that I have something to call them, but since publication is a secondary concern for me right now, I go through most stories without having to commit to a title. I wrote a novel in the fall of 2005 that didn’t settle into anything for three years, and it wasn’t a stroke of creative genius—it was just the classic writerly strategy of keeping my ears open until I heard something worth stealing. My 2010 novel is still untitled, going by EMDASH—in part because it’s an acronym (Exsanguination Makes Death And Sadness Happen) and in part because I am, you may have noticed, rather fond of the em dash.

As I poke at the design for this site, I find myself needing to replace filler material with real material. This includes removing the photo of one of my cats lurking atop my bookshelf, settling on a color scheme, and coming up with a title.

My filler title was The Tiniest Writer (subtitle: Alice Thomsen) because although I’m in roughly the fiftieth percentile, height-wise, I was once part of a writing group where my stature inspired short jokes reaching new creative heights. (“Unlike your head!”) I gave in, embracing it little by little (“That’s how you do everything!”) because people say that once you start laughing at yourself for something, others will stop. This isn’t true, which, although disappointing, gave me an easy way to fill the blank in my site’s headline. (“It’s surprising you could even reach the top of the page without a step stool!”) But no more. I’m standing up for my five-foot-three-and-a-half-inch self and coming up with a real title.

Or, at least, that’s the plan.

You’ll notice that at the moment—depending when you’re reading this—the title is my name, with the subtitle writing with cats on the keyboard. I asked myself, What makes me unique as a writer? What sets my approach apart from that of every other twenty-something wannabe-novelist?

I have two cats. This list sums up our relationship, because my approach to cats is like my approach to short jokes: what happens will happen—just don’t fight it. What this means for my approach to writing, in turn, is that if a cat chooses to lie down across my arms while I’m typing, I’ll keep going, because hey, if I can’t reach that top row, I’ll just spell out the numbers, hold off on the em dashes, and make sure no one gets excited enough to need an exclamation mark. And if a house panther happens to take a path that goes over my keyboard, well, so be it—they say “Kill your darlings!” so it’s just as well I get comfortable using the DELETE key.

Does this give me writerly bragging rights? No. It doesn’t even give me crazy cat lady bragging rights—I think I’d need three cats to qualify for that. But it’s something, at least, and given that fiftieth percentile thing (“Maybe for hobbits!”) it’s probably more accurate.

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