Yes, yes, I’m sure it was 1864. I remember now, because the year sounded very strange. Libby-ah, just listen to it: Yi-ba-liu-si. Miss Banner said it was like saying: Lose home, slide into death. And I said, No, it means: Take hope, the dead remain. Chinese words are good and bad this way, so many meanings, depending on what you hold in your heart. (p 32)

More from/about Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses at iluv2read.

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Andy and I are off to Disney World tomorrow morning. See ya next week!

Andy’s family is here visiting, so needless to say our schedules have been a little different than usual and I didn’t get a chance to post. But Sunday is the new Friday, right?

Anyway, not like anyone’s holding their breath or crying over my Foto Fridays.

So far it’s been a jam-packed weekend, including golfing, going to the World’s Longest Yard Sale, and hopefully not puking at King’s Island. But it started with the Reds game on Friday night, which the Astros won (WOOT!), and which also happened to be Fireworks Night at Great American Ballpark.

Now, I’ve seen some nice fireworks in my time, and as my dad likes to point out, um, all the time, our family comes from New Castle (PA) home to the world famous Zambelli Fireworks company, but we were recently cheated out of our July 4th fireworks show at Clear Lake (TX) when our boat’s motor wouldn’t start, so it was wonderful to get a chance to see some pyrotechnics up close and personal.

Even better: they were AMAZING. This clip is only 1 min and 30 sec of a 20-min show that was one of the best I’ve seen in a long time, maybe one of the top I’ve seen ever. (That list of tops includes the fireworks at July 4th in DC.)

There was your standard stuff:

There was the more distinct stuff:

And then there was the HOLY BAJEEZUS I’VE NEVER SEEN FIREWORKS LIKE THAT IN MY LIFE stuff:

Have YOU ever seen little red Y’s floating down from a firework that just exploded?

More photos and video at my Flickr account, if anyone’s interested.

A while back, Alex told me I had to read THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE. I looked at her like, What, you’re regressing back to our scifi days? Are we going to bust out with the Star Trek dolls — sorry, action figures – and play make-believe again?

Then she hit me over the head and said, No, you dope, I’m just trying to get you to read one of the most awesomest books ever.

Well, it went something like that anyway.

The book of course turned out to be fabulous — and not really scifi, although there is obviously time travel involved — and so when I stumbled across Writer Unboxed, I had to read their interview with the author, Audrey Niffenegger.

I figure writer’s block is a signal to stop working on something straight on and go at it sideways for a while.

I’m trying to put some order into my life, and not do everything for other people before I do my own work. It’s very hard to beat back the needs of other people, because taken singly, they seem so small and doable. Taken en mass they completely engulf me. So I am in the midst of attempting to make a new way for myself.

That reminds me SO much of myself, and the way I’m always dropping my own tasks to do what others ask of me. Work, parents, friends, Andy, Riley… (”Play! Let’s play! Take me outside! Wanna play?”) I always think, Oh sure, I can handle that, no big deal. And if it were just the one thing, or even the two, I probably could. But it’s never just one or two things.

It’s hard training myself to be more selfish — and more importantly, to not think of being “selfish” as bad. Really it’s more about focus, and priorities, and realistic expectations of self. I am not Superwoman, sadly. I am just me, trying to be an author.

I love that I spent all week anticipating Andy’s return from Germany, doing everything possible to make his homecoming pleasant and relaxing — i.e., laundry, vacuuming, dusting, scrubbing, bathing the dog, etc. — and not thirty minutes after he arrives, he gets stung on the toe by a wasp.

>_<

Speaking of unfortunate events, Lemony Snicket was on ABC last night. I enjoyed it even though it was kind of sad the whole way through, I suppose because there was an undertone of comic relief and optimism. Both child actors were excellent — I even think I would have preferred Liam Aiken as Harry Potter — and of course so was Jim Carrey, despite being rather creepy.

Anyway, since I just watched the movie, it seems fitting to post my favorite part of an interview with Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket), which I read a few days ago.

I use a quote a lot that Miles Davis supposedly said to John Coltrane when John Coltrane was in his mode where he would get up and he would solo for five hours. And he was playing with Miles Davis, and Miles Davis said, “Um, you really, you have to keep those solos shorter because we’re trying to have an evening.” And John Coltrane said, “I don’t know what to do. I just put it in my mouth and I keep playing and I don’t know how to stop.” And Miles Davis said, “Take the horn out of your mouth.”

And I always think that when I’m too in love with my own work that I feel that I can’t change it. You know, when I think, “This passage is too long, but every sentence seems glorious. What in the world can I do?” And I think, “Just take the horn out of your mouth.” There is in fact a way to change something. And the fact that you feel sad about it is not necessarily an excuse.

Since Andy’s been gone (no Kelly Clarkson pun intended) all this week in Germany on business, I decided to send him a little surprise, similar to what he did for me before.

I can’t even say “Dad” or the poor little guy goes bonkers looking for Andy, sniffing at the door, etc. Thank goodness he can’t spell.

“A Writing Woman” by Gail Godwin is a really excellent piece — almost more a story than an essay or an advice column.

(This is the fourth and final of the Atlantic Monthly articles I mentioned, BUT then there is their whole archive of literary interviews, plus a few articles I found elsewhere. It never ends!)

Fact and fiction, fiction and fact. Which stops where, and how much to put in of each? At what point does regurgitated autobiography graduate into memory shaped by art? How do you know when to stop telling it as it is, or was, and make it into what it ought to be—or what would make a better story?

I think that’s something every fiction (or “fiction”) writer wrestles with. I still remember when Catie scratched out “Fiction Workshop” in the header of one of my stories and wrote (lovingly), “LIIIIES!!”

We are told to write what we know, and then told that what really happened is too boring, or unresolved. Dialogue should be lifelike, not peppered with the yeahs and ums and whats that we really hear. But so much fiction doesn’t “ring true.” And so much non-fiction (at least lately) has been exposed as fabrication.

Where is the line? Does it matter (to readers)? Isn’t it all just marketing anyway?

I don’t have any answers. Just my own struggles.

I was badly in need of a miracle. I was twenty‑seven years old and had not yet become what I had wanted to be since the age five: a writer. True, I wrote every evening, long exhaustive entries in my journal, to compensate for boring days. I had stayed for three years in my cushy government job — helping the British plan their holidays in the United States — though I had intended to stay one year. I had begun countless stories and novels but there was something “off” about all of them. Either they had the ring of self‑consciousness about them, or they started too slowly and petered out before I ever got to the interesting material that had inspired me in the first place, or they were so close to the current problems of my own life that I couldn’t gain the proper distance and perspective.

Andy pointed out that “proper distance and perspective” may be what I’m lacking with The Good Daughters, and what’s causing me to struggle so much with the revision. [sigh] I think he’s probably right. So I’m going back to the drawing board, which is somewhat disheartening because I’ve invested so much time, effort, and heart into what I’ve already written, but also somewhat exciting, because I know I can do better.

.

These last two are not writing-related, but I liked them.

“The best means of learning to know oneself is seeking to understand others.”

“Yes, that’s it,” he said, in his cool, professional voice. But I saw the blood come into his face; the blush of exultation; he knew he had freed me. Even if it meant freeing me from him.

Another day without Andy, another Atlantic Monthly article.

Riley spent most of his day going between the two pillows I laid flat on the couch, taking turns lying on each. Sadly I am not that easily entertained. Instead, I spent most of today tearing up over television (We Are Marshall and Grey’s Anatomy reruns) and cleaning. Much more interesting, right?

Aaaanyway…

Once you get past the intro, “Writing, Typing, and Economics” is pretty good, contrary to what its title might suggest.

All writers know that on some golden mornings they are touched by the wand — are on intimate terms with poetry and cosmic truth. I have experienced those moments myself. Their lesson is simple: It’s a total illusion. And the danger in the illusion is that you will wait for those moments. Such is the horror of having to face the typewriter that you will spend all your time waiting. I am persuaded that most writers, like most shoemakers, are about as good one day as the next (a point which Trollope made), hangovers apart. The difference is the result of euphoria, alcohol, or imagination. The meaning is that one had better go to his or her typewriter every morning and stay there regardless of the seeming result. It will be much the same.

The best place to write is by yourself, because writing becomes an escape from the terrible boredom of your own personality.

And one of particular interest to me, She Who Cannot Be Funny To Save Her Life:

I would urge my young writers to avoid all attempts at humor. … Humor is an intensely personal, largely internal thing. What pleases some, including the source, does not please others. … Also, as Art Buchwald has pointed out, we live in an age when it is hard to invent anything that is as funny as everyday life.

Hmm, should I let Dooce and Jon Stewart know? Oh wait, their humor IS based on everyday life.

Tonight I dropped Andy off at the airport because he is spending the next week in Germany on business. In truth, I’m lucky: thanks to his summer intern Raunaq, he had to cut what was originally a two-week business trip in half so that he could be here for Raunaq’s final presentation and evaluation. Thank you, Raunaq! (Who doesn’t read this blog, I’m sure…)

Anyway, I thought this would be easier than last year’s one-week trip to Germany, because now we have Riley, and the BlackBerry (free international calls!), and Netflix. And I guess is is easier. But it’s still not easy. However stupid that is.

(Yes, I know he’s coming back, and yes, I know it’s only a week. Facts and feelings are not always aligned, you know?)

To stave off the loneliness, I watched a couple episodes of Hannah Montana, the last half of 10 Things I Hate About You, and all of Monster-In-Law. (Mmm, Michael Vartan…)

Then I went back to the thing that got me through my whole only-child-hood, the thing that made me never feel lonely growing up: reading.

So continuing my earlier post about letters from established writers to us young hopefuls (as published in Atlantic Monthly), here are a few excerpts from “To a Young Writer” by Wallace Stegner (the guy who founded the creative writing program at Stanford University):

For one thing, you never took writing to mean self-expression, which means self-indulgence. You understood from the beginning that writing is done with words and sentences, and you spent hundreds of hours educating your ear, writing and rewriting and rewriting until you began to handle words in combination as naturally as one changes tones with the tongue and lips in whistling. I speak respectfully of this part of your education because every year I see students who will not submit to it—who have only themselves to say and who are bent upon saying it without concessions to the English language. In acknowledging that the English language is a difficult instrument, and that a person who sets out to use it expertly has no alternative but to learn it, you did something else: you forced yourself away from that obsession with self that is the strength of a very few writers and the weakness of so many. You have labored to put yourself in charge of your material; you have not fallen for the romantic fallacy that it is virtue to be driven by it. By submitting to language you submitted to other disciplines, you learned distance and detachment, you learned how to avoid muddying a story with yourself.

How often the writing of young writers is a way of asserting a personality that isn’t yet there, that is only being ravenously hunted for.

… how love lasts, but changes, how life is full of heats and frustrations, causes and triumphs, and death is cool and quiet. It does not sound like much, summarized, and yet it embodies everything you believe about yourself and about human life and at least some aspects of the people you have most loved. In your novel, anguish and resignation are almost in balance. Your people live on the page and in the memory because they have been loved and therefore have been richly imagined.

Because the past couple of months have been extremely hectic and stressful for Andy at work–and because I, you know, do stuff–we’ve decided we should take a relaxing vacation together, just the two of us, no animals, no family.

So of course we spent all of last night banging our heads against the walls trying to figure out where to go, how to get there, what to do, and how much it will all cost.

Relaxation, here we come!