Part of the problem with having a blog is that people read it. So I’m on the phone with my editor yesterday, arguing about a bit of pretty I want to keep in my book, when she takes this “quote” voice with me and says, “Kill your darlings, Diana.” Curses! This is what I get for trying to help people. ::blows raspberry at Kerri, who is out there, lurking:: But seriously, she’s…right. Very smart girl, that Kerri. Dammit.

So, this one’s a bit of a cheat. But it’s Friday, and I’m wiped.

WHEN GOOD ADVICE GOES BAD:

WRITE THE BOOK OF YOUR HEART

Who hasn’t heard this line at a writing workshop? Who hasn’t read it in an essay? Write the Book of Your Heart. A few years ago, I remember reading a post by one frustrated writer who said she was so sick of hearing this particular phrase, and that the book of her heart was The Sun Also Rises* and it had already been written.

Um, talk about taking something to the literal extreme! If I were going to (mis)interpret it that way, I think I’d have a hard time nailing down my choice. Too many books live in my heart. That’s never what “the book of your heart” was supposed to mean.

Actually the way most people interpret it is also not how it was meant to be taken, either. (This is where the cheat comes in). But there’s nothing I can say about this matter that hasn’t already been exquisitely covered by Julie Leto in her extraordinary essay:

Ditching “The Book of Your Heart” for “A Book of Your Voice”

It’s one of the best pieces of writing advice I’ve ever received. No really. Go read it. I’ll wait.

Done? Okay, on we go. As you might have guessed, I love this essay. It cuts through all the artisitc, self-indulgent bullshit we like to tell ourselves and gets to the meat of the matter: how do we, as commercial artists, keep our integrity and pay the rent? It blows the faulty dichotomy of “book of your heart” vs. “book of your wallet” right out of the water. It tells you that yes, you can write books that you love that are also marketable. (And now all you people who didn’t read it the first time, go back and click on that link.)

Okay, off to kill some darlings. The book of my voice needs it.

________________________________________________

*Or something. I can’t remember which classic piece of literature she referenced. Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, maybe? Something. Doesn’t matter.

To point out that this would be an awesome time to join the SecretSocietyGirl yahoo group. There’s no chatting, just your standard newsletter format. I’m holding a drawing (in honor of Halloween, every Secret Society’s favorite holiday) for the recipients of the newsletter, and the prize is an awesome, limited-edition prototype (Secret) Society Girl hoodie (those of you in Reno saw me modeling it regularly). Only 17 of its kind in existence!

Membership on the group also gives you special, “Initiates-only” access to the soon-to-be-launched (Secret) Society Girl website, plus other Initiate benefits that, okay, I’ll be honest, have yet to be ascertained. Anyway, join now. Be the first to see my cover (okay, well after me, of course. And probably Sailor Boy. And, like, my agent). Win a hoodie before they even hit the streets!

alt=”Click here to join SecretSocietyGirl”>
Click to join SecretSocietyGirl

Before I begin today, I wanted to point out that these mini-essays are not meant to say that the advice is bad or shouldn’t be followed. I think it’s good advice. I’m trying to point out ways in which perfectly good advice as perverted or misinterpreted. In the case of yesterday’s topic, Passive Voice, you have advice to avoid using passive voice perverted to mean “take out all the ‘was’ and ‘hads’ in your book.” Which is not what it means.

Also, watched Paycheck yesterday. Now, despite the practically criminal lack of respect John Woo seems to have for logic or the laws of physics, I always enjoy his movies. Is that bad? You really can’t examine his films very long, or the whole thing begins to disintegrate in a series of illogical jumps, improbably moments and bizarre characterization, but they are fun.

Today’s topic on WHEN GOOD ADVICE GOES BAD

KILL YOUR DARLINGS

At my very first TARA meeting in 2002, the now-bestselling Karen Hawkins gave a lovely speech about writing humor, but in the course of the speech, she gave me one of the best pieces of writing advice I have ever received: Love the book, not the scene. Not the scene, not the line, not the sunset not the quip, not the juicy secondary character, not the saucy shake of the head that the heroine makes. Love the book, not the scene. We’ve all been there. We’ve all written lines, scenes, descriptions, and characters that we absolutely ADORE. They’re so cute, so funny, so poignant, so perfect… well, except for in the service for which they’ve been created, which is to make your book perfect.

You don’t want to lose them, They’re too good to banish from your pages. So you try to work around them, because you know that they aren’t right for the book. At best, this produces a book with an off note, a flat key in the midst of a beautiful melody. At worst you get completely off track with your book, subverting your entire story for the sake of this one perfect scene that you can’t bear to part with.

Stop that. Stop it right now. Love the book, not the scene. Extract it carefully if you must, then preserve it in a little file for wayward scenes that are beautiful — but remove it from your book before it becomes a cancer. Love the book, not the scene. I think it’s Faulkner who calls this “Killing your babies.” I’ve also heard it referred to (by slightly less paternal types) as “killing your darlings.” No matter, it all means the same thing. If you love something, but it doesn’t work, take it out. Love the book, not the scene.

So, how can such a fabulous piece of advice, one of my favorites, be used for evil? Glad you asked. As with many things, it’s all a matter of degrees.

Two years after that fateful workshop with Karen Hawkins, I was at a national conference of a writer’s group in Dallas (do the math), minding my own business in a craft workshop when a multi-published author stood before the crowd of eager young scribblers and told them, “Kill your Darlings.” Fair enough. I began scribbling it down, translating into my head my already oft-repeated Hawkinsinian mantra of “Love the Book, Not the Scene.” (Some people like Ohm mani padme hum, I like this. Sue me.) In fact I was so distracted by the mantra, that I almost missed what she said next, which fair knocked me out of my seat.

In fact, if there’s a part of your story that you find especially wonderful, whatever your favorite piece is, it’s a sure bet that’s the part that has to be cut.

The hell?!?! I then spent the next half hour, hand pressed to my chest in shock, at a lunch table of other workshop attendees who cleaved to that bit of advice, and expounded at length about how self-indulgent and counterproductive it was to keep any part of the story you actually liked in your book. Obviously, if you liked it, it meant it was wrong. (I excused myself early and headed to the bar for a stiff one.)

Are we supposed to be such absolutely wretched judges of our own work that we can’t find beauty in a particular part of the book without it being some sort of subconscious desire to defend it against proper deletion? That is, if one will pardon my coarse speech, horseshit. I will not deny that I have steadfastly clung to bits of scenes and/or lines and defended them unnecessarily against wiser CPs and editors and my own conscience before remembering my mantra. We all do that. But I am not so deluded as to think that the touchstone for whether or not something works should be cut from a book hinges on the degree that I love it. In fact, my favorite scene in my current book is actually my editor’s favorite scene as well. Says so write on the revision letter. ::smugness::

Ideally, I’m in love with every piece of my book, because they make the book, which I love more than all the pieces, work. And, in the process I might fall for a few pieces that don’t work so well. And, those, sadly, I will have to steel myself to excise.

The “Kill Your Darlings” perversion is a classic case of taking a perfectly good piece of advice to a bizarre, literal extreme. Sometimes I wonder about those workshop goers, if they went home and cut out every bit that they liked from their book. Every delicious description of their hero. Every rapid-fire page of sexually-charged banter. Every heartfelt declaration of love. Every part they liked, even the ones that worked, because they liked them. Don’t laugh. People sometimes take these workshop speakers at their word, especially if they are particularly successful.

So the moral of this story is, don’t kill your darlings just because they are darlings. That’s a crappy way to tell if something is bad for your book. Kill them because and only if they don’t work for the story. Love the book, not the scene. (And take everything you hear at a workshop or in an essay or on a writing blog with a grain of salt.)

So I’m in Starbucks today, and I spot a CD sitting on the counter (is it me, or is Starbucks a coffee shop that really wants to be a record store?). This is apparently the acoustic-version, tenth anniversary compilation of Alanis Morrisette’s Jagged Little Pill. Now, if you’re my age, and an American female with a certain cultural background, this is the most important CD in your life (for boys, I think it might be Sublime). Oh, the hours I spent shouting along with poor, angry Alanis. Thinking back on it, I barely even knew what going down on someone in a theater was. So it’s been ten years since that album came out? How time doth fly.

So, back to the topic at hand. If you’ve been following the comments section on the previous post (and, as Theresa Nielsen Hayden says, the comments are half the fun) you’ll see that we’ve already followed a few topics. I also thought I’d begin with the ones I mentioned in my intro post. So, without further ado, or reminiscences into my adolescent musical tastes:

WHEN GOOD ADVICE GOES BAD

Try Not To Use Passive Voice
First, a quick review of that lovely quagmire known as English grammar. Which of the following is passive voice?

a) Sailor Boy hit the ball.
b) The ball hit Sailor Boy.
c) The ball was hit by Sailor Boy.

Easy, right? Now, one can imagine that this is very good advice at the outset, because passive voice is often used to deflect agency from the person doing the action. It focuses on the object. Picture a child telling his parents about how the glass just “got bumped” off the table. Kids trying to get out of trouble are experts at passive voice. Beginning writers sometimes fall back on it for the same reason: it lets their characters off the hook from actually having to do anything. Which, as one can imagine, doesn’t work so well in fiction.

However, the passive voice has a long and glorious history in fiction of being used to create suspense. When someone has been shot, when a mysterious letter is left on a table, when you awaken to find that a bloody horse’s head was tucked between your bedsheets — well then, that’s all passive voice. Who did it? Ah, there’s the rub. So by all means, one should not completely eschew this perfectly reasonable grammatical construction.

The problem comes in here. If one looks at my above examples of passive construction, the same word keeps popping up: forms of “to be”. In English, the passive voice is constructed using forms of the verb to be plus a participle. “Has been shot” “is left,” “was tucked,” etc. Enterprising individuals with, perhaps, a less than perfect grasp of English grammar then seized upon the lofty and noble “to be” as the culprit of all “passive construction” and sought to excise it from their (and other people’s) work.

The damage is twofold because of a another, similar-sounding piece of advice, which goes like this: Try Not To Use A Passive Voice. In this case, the advice giver might have been attempting, somewhat clumsily, to encourage writers to embrace strong verbs. “Passive voice” is co-opted from its grammatical usage as a stand-in for the opposite of “an aggressive writer’s voice.” This is the same family of advice that urges you to say “race” rather than “ran quickly” and to rewrite sentences to exclude “to be” and “make/do” verbs (i.e., rather than “Sailor Boy was happy because Diana made him fried chicken for dinner,” to use “Sailor Boy could hardly suppress his glee when Diana served him fried chicken that night”). It’s stronger writing. This advice giver might have saved us all a lot of trouble had she said “weak writing”. Or perhaps she did, and it has since somehow collided with the perfectly innocent “passive voice” to create a mutated monster.

However the evolution of the beast, the fact remains that plenty of us have received feedback on contests in which some red pen-happy judge has crossed out every single “had,” “was,” “have been,” and etc. In the entire manuscript in the never-ending quest “not to use passive voice.” How I have been tempted (yep, passive voice, and I can only assume it was the devil tempting me) to write in my thank you note to such a judge that “Jane was dying” is past continuous tense, not passive voice, and there is a huge freakin’ difference between “Jane was dying” and “Jane died.”

So, should one use passive voice? Should one use “was?” I say yes to both, sparingly, sprinkled like Fleur de Sal, and only where it is the best choice for the manuscript. Trying to build suspense? You bet. Trying to keep it snappy? Sure, why not? Trying to make it unclear who it was that did what in the midst of a melee? Passive voice has got your back. And please, don’t cut all the “was” out of your manuscript if it means killing off poor Jane, who should live to fight another day.

Hey, devoted blog-readers!

Sorry to be MIA recently. I had to do a lot of catch up after being sick, and I’ve also been hard at work with my revisions (eleven pages, will talk about them more in detail later).

I think that all my rants should come with warning signs. What do you think? Beware… here there be snarkiness… Because, here’s the thing. I’m introducing a new feature here on the blog called…

WHEN GOOD ADVICE GOES BAD

The longer you’ve been in this business, the more advice you hear and the more you realize that supposed “rules” might not be so gosh darn helpful after all. In fact, if handled incorrectly, they might damage your writing, your career, and even your well-being. I’ve read a ton of articles, gone to a bunch of conferences, jotted down notes at more seminars than I attended in an average semester at Yale. I’ve seen good advice, well-meant but misleading advice, and some pretty bad advice. (And yes, I do realize that what is one person’s bad advice might be another person’s nugget of gold, so I’m not even touching that here. I’m talking about really bad advice.) One thing that has always amazed me is what I perceive as an seemingly endless number of ways to misinterpret (sometimes willfully so) good advice.

I’ve always been a fan of Socrates’ statement that true wisdom is realizing how much you don’t know. In general, i think it can save you from a world of trouble. On its most obvious level, it keeps you searching for answers. There are a whole lot of people out there who rush off blindly into things without really examining them beforehand, because they have no idea how much they don’t know about it. However, there’s a deeper subtext here about knowing what it is you do know, as well, which is very important. If you don’t know what it is you know, then how do you know you don’t know it wrong? (And again, this goes back to looking for answers. Always a good idea to stop periodically and take stock of what it is you know and make sure you aren’t mistaken anywhere. Ask Descartes.)

For instance, now that people actually want to ask me for advice, for critiques, for anything, I feel paralyzed by doubts. Before I sold, I thought I knew a bunch of shit. Actually, I still do, but I realize that this bunch is only one on a whole tree in a whole acre of shit that I don’t know. There is so much about this business that I don’t understand. The book I sold started out as a project purposefully designed to bomb in contests, fo Pete’s sake! Looking at things from the perspective of the newly-contracted, I see that so much stuff I worried about before, so many things that I obsessed over as a new writer don’t matter a hill of beans. I see a lot of mistakes I made, and I see a lot of times when I thought I was doing things right by following certain bits of advice, but now realize that, on occasion, I had everything cocked up in my head. The bunch of knowledge I amassed pertained only to me — what do I have to do and know to be able to do what it is that I want to in the way I want it done? (Follow that?) It doesn’t necessarily apply to anyone else. Every time I would try to give advice, I peppered it with so many qualifiers and exceptions that I think I sounded like the old English grammar nursery rhyme:

I before E except after C
Or when sounding like A as in ‘neighbor’ or ‘weigh.’

Do it this way. Except for this market. Or, if you write like that. Heck, it’s “all in the execution.” Just don’t let that be your excuse for doing it wrong. You can only do it wrong if you know you’re doing it wrong and you’re doing that on purpose because it works doing it wrong. How do you know if it works? Dunno, you just do.

Yeah, like that kind of talk could help anyone?

But how could I think the things I thought were right, if I’d heard of situations where it worked the other way, or if I didn’t end up following my own advice at all? I vivdly remember cringing the first time I read a post about another new writer hoping to dash off three chapters to send to an agent so it could be up at auction next week. You know, because it worked for Diana Peterfreund. I felt incredibly guilty, like I’d somehow passed off bad advice or a bad example. (Not even Catholic, yet still capable of such ginormous guilt.) I still believe that first time authors should market finished books. I don’t think the publishing industry moves fast. I don’t think first time authors should count on making any kind of significant money.

In addition to the rather likely possibility of looking like a big fat hypocrite, there was an added bonus of giving out advice that people would misinterpret. I saw signs of this everywhere. I hang out on enough writing loops and websites that I’d commonly see the same answers repeated and forwarded on loop after loop until they began to resemble a game of “Telephone” and were perverted to encompass meanings and connotations that the giver never intended. I’d see folks asking an industry professional (IP) the same question over and over again until they got the answer they were looking for, which wouldn’t do them any good. I’d see a casual comment by an IP or experienced pub turned into the Word from On High, advice followed slavishly to the letter while the writer ignores the point, advice given for a specific situation that is then universalized inappropriately, and suggestions that come with the caveat of “if you know what you’re doing” be leapt upon by folks looking for “the magical short cut.”

So I got really nervous about saying anything. I don’t want the responsibility of telling soemone something that may be wrong, may be wrong for them, may reflect poorly on what others have done well, or may be misinterpreted in any number of ways so as to ruin this person’s entire career. Dude, I’m 26! How should I know?

But anyone who has been around me for more than a few weeks knows that I’m pathologically incapable of keeping my opinions to myself. So give out advice I did and do and will continue doing, because as frustrating and difficult as it is, I can’t bear to see people in a bad situation, or plowing blindly into a bad situation without at least giving them a heads up about what they might find as bad about it as I do.

My friends say I’ll grow out of this.

But then I think about where I’d be if wiser folks than me didn’t give me a heads up about bad stuff that I was doing, if I hadn’t stumbled on this article or that website that served as a giant lightbulb moment, and I hope that I don’t grow out of it. I hope that people wiser than me don’t stop giving me good advice. I hope I don’t stop trying to learn what is the best way for me to do things. Because, like I said, the thing I know best is that there’s a lot I don’t know.

So, caveats and qualifiers aside, let’s talk about the purported subject of this post:

WHEN GOOD ADVICE GOES BAD

(Oh, right, says the reader, who has totally gotten lost in my syntax.)

Over the next few days, I will be reporting on various bits of great writerly advice that has been trampled, maimed, perverted and otherwise turned to dastardly means. Everything from the simple “try not to use passive voice,” a banner that has been waved in every wholesale genocide of the word “had”; to the more complicated career questions, such as “start with category because it’s easier.” I have a running list I’m eager to dive into, but would love it if people felt like sharing their own in the comments section. And here, of course, we’re looking for advice that is well meant but leads to errors, or even good advice that we can explore and see how we might be, even now, interpreting it in a damaging manner. I hope to learn a lot.

Eh. I’m in a quiz mood.

Far too lazy. Didn’t work on my next essay tonight, but I did watch Lost and Invasion. And The Daily Show. Wow, TV. It’s like a drug. But, since I’ve seen it maybe once or twice this summer, I think I’m coping pretty well.

By the way, what was up with that “next week” teaser on Lost? “The fate of the survivors will be revealed? Are they canceling the show?

Here’s a fun quiz. So right, too. What classic movie am I?

What Classic Movie Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

I have a post I’d like to write brewing somewhere in the back of my head. It’s about rules and craft and submissions and the industry and industry myopia, but the yeast hasn’t risen yet, so I’m holding off. In the meantime, I stumbled across this article from The Guardian, which says, in part (in response to a previously self-published author’s opinion that publishing is a cartel):

Every industry needs quality control. One thing that differentiates the
publishing world from, say, the medical world, is that stitching an
abdominal suture requires specific qualifications, whereas writing a
novel calls for skills which, though far less quantifiable, are
absolutely necessary for success. Just because hospitals lack the
resources to field hundreds of requests a week from people wanting to
perform open-heart surgery, it does not follow that the medical world is
some kind of shadowy clique.

It made me think of the old joke. So, a novelist and a brain surgeon are at a cocktail party. “What do you do?” asks the brain surgeon. “I’m a novelist,” the novelist says. “Oh,” says the brain surgeon. “I was thinking of taking the summer off and writing a novel.” “Funny,” says the novelist, “I was thinking of taking the summer off and being a brain surgeon.”

Ba-dum-bum-ching!

Naturally. as the daughter of a surgeon, I am not about to belittle the decade my father spent in hard core studying to learn how to save people’s lives. (Another blog topic: “Why I hate people who dismiss doctors”, but I digress.) However, I do think there is a certain dismissal of the idea that it takes serious skill and application to be a novelist because there is no set course for such a profession. Some people major in creative writing then go to fancy MFA programs and spend years honing their craft before they get soemthing through the gates, other people sit down in their basement with a notebook one day, and say, I want to write a novel, and through a combination of natural, God-given talent, dumb luck and yes, serious application, they write one and sell it.

The latter is probably the most damaging to my cause of getting people to realize how hard this is. Because there are people that just do it, without training or experience. And you can’t really say that about brain surgeons. But, do they really have no training or experience?

I’ve been writing stories since I could hold a pen. Growing up, I eschewed most organized sports and board games in favor of long sessions of “imagine” etc. In college, I spent long hours writing stories. I majored in literature. I read a ton. [Glances at wall covered in bookshelves.] Maybe two tons. I imagine these overnight successes had similar “training”.

Before we had schools, doctors and other trained technicians learned their craft through a complicated system of apprenticeship. They watched the masters, then the copied the masters, then they helped the masters, and then they did it on their own. Reading books is like watching the masters. Writing stories in the style of those whose voice you most admire is like copying them. Then, finally, you get to work on your own. Visual art has used this system. And it’s commonly held that many writers’ first attempts are derivative of whoever’s work they’ve most recently admired.

I think my path to publication falls somewhere in between the two extremes I mentioned above. I never attended an MFA program, but neither did I sit down and sell the first book I’d ever written. I’ve now written five novels. And after I decided to do this, joined RWA, and read everything I could get my hands on about how to write a book. I discarded a lot of it as utter crapola or too elementary to be of any use to me. (Oddly enough, I’ve never found a need to brush up on my ability to include conflict in my novels, which many writers struggle with. I knew intuitively — because of my long association with “masterworks” — that stories need trouble to be stories.) I recognized the value of certain teachings for other people, but already has a pretty clear idea in my head of what I knew and, more importantly, what I needed to learn. So that cut down a lot on what I still needed to do. There are certain mistaken beliefs that it’s a queue and it’s “not fair” when some people sell quickly and others don’t. Well, all that’s true, if you account for the fact that the starts are staggered and the finish line is a time warp. But I worked really hard on craft (by writing manuscript after manuscript) and business for the better part of three years.

And it’s good that it’s been working because, um… I don’t really have a back up plan. When I started this, and it became clear to my father that I wasn’t going to be published yesterday, he asked me how long I was going to do this before trying a real career. I told him that it had taken him four years to get through medical school. We hit four years since graduation in June, so I just made it under the wire. ::phew::

When I first started, at 23, I had ridiculous expectations about how long it would take. I figured one year to write and sell something, and then one year for it to be published. I wanted to have a book out by the time I was 25. Then I wanted to sell a book by the time I was 25. Then I wanted to sell a book when I was 25. Damn. I sold two books four months after turning 26, and they will be out when I’m 27. Could be worse. I’m told the average time it takes to sell a book is four years. I hate being average, but I’ll take it over delinquent.

Still, never once in all this time, did I believe publishing was a cartel. My books weren’t good enough, the agent was mistaken, the market wasn’t right, the editor was using crack… all of these things I thought. But I could write a better book, find an agent I meshed with more, look for a new market, outlive the editor* — in short, pull the bike up off the curb, brush the gravel from my skinned knees, and start again. I never got to the point where I thought that you coudn’t get in if you were new and unknown. And I don’t think I would. I’d think it was hard, but rightly so. We want to do something really really hard. And I knew too many people who were unconnected and just wrote a good story and followed the directions and submitted it and didn’t give up and sold it and are now authors.

Maybe I’ve been lucky. Maybe I joined an RWA chapter where everyone was treated with respect, no matter what their publishing credentials (I’ve heard tell of other chapters where pubbed members are gods and unpubbed members are the unwashed masses lucky to be allowed to gaze upon such splendor). I made friends with good people and good writers, I took advice from same, and I never bought into the idea that only a published person knew the magic handshake. (And, take it from one (Secret) Society Girl, they don’t teach you one when you are sold.) Some of the most talented writers I know remain mystifyingly unpublished, but I never thought of that any differently from another industry that makes a business error. A shoe store fails to stock the new thing in fall footwear, or a fast food chain is behind the times in the rise in health food.

From my limited experience int eh publishing industry, there’s nothing the agents and editors like *more* than finding a great new writer. I think they like it even more than picking up a great established author (which they love). We’re a nation of discoverers, it’s a cultural fantasy.

Do I know why these great books that get passed over get passed over? Lord no. But I do know that it’s not on purpose.

_______________________
*Which I have.

1. Being at a dinner party where every single other person at the table was either currently in or had been in graduate school. I was feeling intimidated until one said, “Yeah, but you’re a novelist.”

2. Reading gossip magazines and wondering if I should talk about how much I love Sailor Boy on my blog. Like, maybe one day we’ll break up and then I’ll be quoted forever talking about how wonderful it is that we can be in a situation and both think the exact same thing that we file away for later to joke with one another about and everyone will think, “No one saw this one coming, right?” “What did he ever SEE in her?” and “Can we call them Sailana?”

3. A mom with kids at the next table over who forced her children to order off the kids menu at a diner where there were many healthier options that the kids seemed to prefer to fried frozen chicken fingers. I was quite mystified, because the “kids portions” were as big as mine, and the price wasn’t smaller either. She seemed to decide this arbitrarily based on the theroy that kids should be eating off the kids menu. I decided then and there that when I have a family, our house would have a “breakfast anytime” option. (Especially in the age of enlightenment.)

4. The fact that the bookshelves we bought at IKEA might be the first things we’ve purchased that don’t fit in the back of Nikita. We had to tie her trunk down to get home. That was scary.

5. That my long-standing fantasy of putting together bookshelves with my partner in a lamplit room as a symbol of being grown up and independent and in love might be more fun as fantasy than as reality. Especially when we disagree on where to place the nails.

6. The West Wing. Always and again.

7. Trying out not one, but two new recipes and loving them both. They are stovetop (read, one pan) beef stroganoff and alfredo chicken pot pie.

8. Being in a clothing store and wondering how it is that fashion has so quickly outpaced what I feel are acceptable body coverings. I’m too young to be unfashionable, aren’t I? I’m a skinny girl, and I like to dress with a liberal-to-moderate degree of modesty, but everything in the store made me look a) pregnant and b) like a streetwalker. When Sailor Boy asks you, at the dressing room, if the shirt you’ve tried on is made to be worn outside of bed, you know fashion has gone overboard.

9. Getting asked to borrow the car for the first time. Saying yes immediately, then thinking about it, then wondering how anyone who has ever lent me a car has been wiling to do so, then realizing that I am karmically obliged to lend mine. Curses.

10. My upcoming revision letter.

Regarding the last, it’s coming Tuesday. Pretty excited/nervous. For the next few days, I have a lecture series planned for the blog. (Yay! Boo! Hiss! Shhh…. sorry, inside joke.) This will give me time to do some digesting before I come out here and spill all the gory details… like, how many pages it is.

I’ve got another virus. Fortunately, this one I’m happy about.

So I told y’all about how I’ve been watching Firefly so that I know what’s going on when the movie Serenity hits theaters at the end of the month. I’ve been enjoying it (far more than I ever did when it was on TV (briefly) let me tell you!). I hope the movie’s a big hit.

Apprently, Joss Whedon, in his infinite wisdom, has launched what’s called a “viral marketing campaign.” What is that, you may ask? Well, apparently it involves people telling other people about the cool marketing. Or something. Not quite clear. Anyway, I found out about it yesterday, and since I may just be the lowest of the low on the Firefly foodchain, I’m sure that everyone else who has any interest in this has probably already seen it. Still, I draw your attention to it, in hopes that you might actually develop some interest, and go see this film.

At the end of August, videos began popping up on iFilm and other sites called the “R. Tam Sessions.” R. Tam is River Tam, the name of one of the characters in Serenity. In the show Firefly, her brother, a hot, hotshot young doctor, rescued her from a secret government lab where they were torturing and experimenting on her (her family sent her to what they thought was a school for gifted children), and now both Tams are on the run from some very scary folks determined to get River back, and have taken refuge on the not-quite-legal cargo ship Serenity. These experiments have turned River into a paranoid schizophrenic who may or may not also have some pretty cool superpowers. So, your basic sci-fi premise.

The R. Tam Sessions (watch ‘em in order for the full effect):

Session 416, Second Excerpt
Session 1 Excerpt
Session 22 Excerpt
Session 165 Excerpt
Session 416, First Excerpt

Get the complete sessions in Quicktime here or click on the link above for a bunch of different formats, sites, and other info.

I think this so idea is just so extraordinarily cool. I want a viral marketing campaign!