400 words (of approx. 2,000 words total)

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Laurie, I have to tell you something. I should have done this a long time ago. But I didn’t, and I don’t have any excuses. I hope you will forgive me.

I hope I can forgive myself.

* * *

Your mother was seventeen when she got her first boyfriend. Danny Spence. He was eighteen, also a senior, and he had a habit of answering every question in class correctly, albeit under his breath. Kate-your mother-had known of Danny for years, through mutual courses and friends, but mostly they’d stayed on the periphery of one another’s lives, faint blips in the outer ring of radar that weren’t really worth worrying about.

Then one day he showed up dead center.

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I have been terrible these past couple weeks. It’s as if after finishing my novel I gave myself a free pass to slack! Well, the pass has been revoked. It’s time to get my butt in gear. I have about 40 days to whip my first 50 pages into shape for a certain contest, plus a couple short stories that have been sitting around waiting to be finished, plus another novel that won’t write itself!

And that’s only in my writing life. There’s also the full-time job, the potential side web project (probably a bad idea), and the boyfriend, the pup, the family, and the friends. Oh dear.

If only I didn’t get so tired…

From “Rough Draft,” the Cincinnati Writers’ Project newsletter:

There are precisely two cannots in the writing universe without caveats. 1) You cannot bore your reader, 2) You cannot piss off your editor. It’s that simple.

I haven’t actually attended the group yet (that comes on Wednesday) but from their newsletter I can tell two things: they’re funny, and they know what they’re talking about. Both could be good for me.

Sometimes it’s so hard to find what it is I’m trying to say. People might think you can turn creativity on and off, but it’s not like that. It just kinda comes out. A mash-up of all these things you collect in your mind. You never know when it’s going to happen, but when it does, it’s like magic. It’s just that simple, and it’s just that hard.

(You can watch Gwen’s commercial on HP’s website here.)

She’s got it, man. I mean, there’s a lot of hard work that goes into “creativity,” but you can’t make a fire without a spark, no matter how hard you rub those two sticks together.

Some days there are more sparks than others. Some days there are no sparks at all. (Those days stink.) Some days there are tons of sparks, but I’m too busy rubbing those two sticks somewhere else (work, sleep, relationships, self) that I miss out. I think that’s what I hate the most: inconvenient inspiration.

It used to happen to me all the time in class. In fact, I get most of my ideas “when I shouldn’t.” When I was in school, that meant I was scribbling in my journal instead of taking notes on double integrals, or the Battle of Gettysburg, or the function of the amygdala. Some of those ideas panned out — in fact, I’m still working on some of them now — but a lot didn’t. But that doesn’t matter, because they were coming hard and fast, and it was fun.

I don’t get as many ideas anymore. I think it’s because my mind isn’t being as stimulated, at least not in as many different ways as it was when I was taking a breadth of courses with a diversity of people. I thought maybe it would happen at work: inspiration would strike right in the middle of a call with a client! I’d have to covertly scribble my thoughts in the midst of my project notes! My boss would wonder why I suddenly looked so happy, and I’d have to say that I was just really excited about next round of proofreading!

But what’s worse than having to cover up my inspiration is not getting it at all.

Okay, I do still get ideas. It’s not like I’m a dried-up well (pardon the cliché) or a has-been at age 22. (God I hope not.) But I think I need more stimulation. Work is pleasant, but it’s routine. I need to be confronted by knowledge, moved to tears, astounded by reality.

So what’s my plan for now?

Watch PBS.

Honestly! I don’t know if it’s a real solution, but it’s a start. Watching PBS, reading the news, listening to people… it’s all about the stories. The people, the places, the real emotions that we feel and deal with. The more I take in, the more I “mash up” (to use Gwen’s phrase). The more I take in, the more I can spit out. And polish. And shine.

And man do I want to shine.

351 words

Ama looked at my cousins. “Too skinny.
But Maggie,” she said. “Maggie is just right.”
I smiled, because I was hai hao, good enough, and more,
here on this little island in the Pacific, where heat
oppressed and sweat stuck my brown hair to my face.
This is where I say and mean, wo ai ni.

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2420 words

You’ve come to New York City to get away. You heard about the Gates, and the fact that they’re being taken down in two days, and you think, Why not? Why not go to Central Park, take a look at these Gates, and escape this hell for the weekend? It sounds like a good plan, so you set out to make it happen. It’s the first thing you’ve been able to make yourself do in quite a while.

A few of your classmates were planning to drive up to New York anyway, so you catch a ride with them. Your university is several hours away from the City, and you spend the entire ride curled up in the backseat silently writing letters to a certain someone, letters that you’ll never send. This makes you sad, but you can’t stop. There’s too much to say, too much to feel, and you cannot keep it all in. It doesn’t help that every song on the radio reminds you of him.

When you finally arrive in the City, it is dark, and going to see the Gates doesn’t make sense. You decide to wait for morning. So now you have the whole night to kill, because it’s late, but it isn’t that late. You take the subway to Times Square, where there will surely be something going on, something to occupy your mind.

And there is. Unfortunately, it isn’t what you expected.

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921 words

My parents and I have come to visit my grandmother. We live in Houston, TX, and she in Taipei, Taiwan, so this is no small occasion. After an 18-hour, $1000-per-person, transoceanic flight, my mom and dad are tired and want to rest. I, on the other hand, am strangely awake.

First I put my suitcase in what will be my room for the next two weeks. (It actually belongs to my cousin, who I call Ge ge, or big brother, but he is currently serving his required 22 months in the Taiwanese military.) Then I pad down the stairs and through the living room into my grandmother’s bedroom.

She’s asleep, lying in the middle of her queen-sized mattress, swallowed up by a big flowery comforter. (Everyone else, including me, sleeps on stiff bamboo mats with only a few thin sheets.) A fan rotates back and forth on its stand, blowing cool humid air across the soft skin of my grandmother’s forehead. I sit in one of the big wooden chairs in the hallway and look in on her through the door.

Sometimes she doesn’t know who we are.

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344 words

Today you have been with me. I have seen your face, heard your voice, felt your touch. Yes, though you are far, in body and in spirit, today you have been with me.

When I woke this morning, I didn’t really wake. I lay in bed in that precarious state of half-sleep, and my mind drifted. My mind drifted, and it found you. You, lying next to me. You, with your arm around my waist. You, breathing on my neck. When I woke this morning, I was not alone. You were there with me.

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I don’t write to espouse my views.

I write to espouse viewing.

Yesterday at 11:20 pm, I accomplished my most important goal for 2007: I finished the first draft of my first novel, The Good Daughters.

It’s an amazing feeling to have finished even the first draft!

Now my goals for 2008 are to revise The Good Daughters and send it out for publishing, and to write the first draft of a second novel.

The work of a writer is never done, I suppose. (Not until they stop being a writer, anyway.)

But I don’t mind. :)