smartgrrrl's guide to stuff » writing

Well, that was fun.

Michelle Wiener — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:29:44 +0000

I didn’t realize that it had been almost two weeks since my last post. So … I made it to almost three weeks of posting every weekday. I think that’s a new personal record, and I’m not going to sweat the fact that I stopped posting.

Basically I just wanted to put this here because leaving that last post up there was starting to bother me. I’ve had a few encouraging days since the 18th, and I wanted to say so.

Consider yourselves told.

I’ll be back later this week. I promise.

Michelle Wiener — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 21:57:01 +0000

This has not been a particularly encouraging day.

No related posts.

I am full and sleepy and not ready for writing.

Michelle Wiener — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 21:35:14 +0000

Before I left to meet a friend for lunch I started writing today’s post, but finishing it means going down a not very pleasant part of memory lane and I’m not emotionally there yet. I want to write it, I feel like it will be good for me to write it, but it’s 4:30 and getting dark and despite having two cups of fairly strong coffee I have the post-eatie sleepies and I kind of want to slack off at the moment and since I am the boss of me, I’m going to allow myself to do just that.

(It’s not even a terribly traumatic thing that I want to write about. I don’t want to build it up to be some sort of DEFINING MOMENT in my life. But considering that it happened when I was 7 and I still think about it and it still kinda bothers me … maybe it is a defining moment. In any case, it’s worth putting more mental energy into it than I have right now.)

(Also I just want to knit. Or play Skyrim.)

Learning to Code

Michelle Wiener — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 22:55:30 +0000

I joined Code Year 2012 yesterday. Not (necessarily) in an effort to improve myself, by which I mean my chances at finding full-time or more freelance employment, but primarily because my love for learning new things has been somewhat reclusive of late, unwilling to take chances or risks for fear of … something. Failure, probably. Or that I’d be just mediocre at it. I don’t know why my brain can’t be satisfied with just being OK at something, but no. It insists I be brilliant at all things from the moment I try them. My brain is the worst.

But one of my new year’s resolutions is “learn something new,” and I was in the right sort of curious mindset when I read a brief article about Code Year yesterday morning, and actually I do want to learn more programming stuff to help my job prospects, and I’ve always been interested in how the Internet gets made. When I was still in graduate school I taught myself HTML, just for fun. I think I was drawn to the mathiness of code; after spending so much of my mental energy grading papers, creating lesson plans, reading difficult theory books and writing both my dissertation proposal and a slew of conference papers and proposals, it was so nice to write something not abstract. Something that, if it didn’t work, had a concrete solution.

I got to the point where I could create a really crappy website from scratch (and did, and wow was it crappy. Not, like, Geocities or Angelfire crappy, but close), and I started learning about CSS and then Javascript before I had to turn my attention to what I was supposed to be doing, and I never got back to it. (Unless I had to tweak something in an already written CSS, which I am occasionally called upon to do. Usually with my own websites with their pre-existing themes.)

So I’m pleased that Code Year 2012 starts off with basic Javascript programming, and even more pleased that I find it challenging yet doable. I’ve finished the first week’s eight-part lesson already, and I cruised through the first five or six parts, tricking my brain into thinking I am a programming GENIUS, and then I got stuck. And I didn’t get stuck in a “how do I do this” way, I got stuck in a “why did that work” way. I got the go-ahead to move on to the next lesson, but I could see that the code wasn’t right. Dan had to explain later that while my version of the code was technically correct, I had it ordered incorrectly.

He also had to explain why this particular code would be useful to programmers. The code had to do with numbers, and it had to do with counting, and I failed to see the practical applications — unlike the other bits of code that prompted a user to enter his or her name. I see how THAT would be applied to a website or program immediately. This is a thing that has always been true of my learning process: Not only do I need immediate hands-on lessons (which is why Code Year is proving to be my favorite tutorial so far — I get right in there), but I also need to have concrete examples of why something might be useful. I’m sure getting a program to count up or down would be tremendously useful, but I’m not a programmer and don’t have a programmer’s imagination and I can’t think what I would use that code for. And it’s embarrassing to admit that, for surely there are programmers among you who are scoffing right now, but I’m fine with putting this here because it will serve as an (embarrassing) reminder when I finally cross over that barrier preventing me from seeing what you all see. Until then, I’m sticking with “Yay, I got the computer to count to 5 and then stop. So there’s a thing I can do now. Woo?”

I got super-stuck later on, after I’d finished the lesson and moved on to the extra project designed to test my new skills. I was supposed to write a program that would eventually count to 20, replacing each number divisible by 3 with “Fizz,” each number divisible by 5 with “Buzz,” and each number divisible by both 3 and 5 with “FizzBuzz.” I guess this is a a fairly well-known word game, though I’ve never heard of it before, and it’s also apparently a litmus test for programmers on the job hunt to filter out those who can’t program at all. In which case I think it’s absolutely fantastic that Code Year is using it in their very first lesson. What a fun inside joke.

I ran into my other learning process trap, though, in that I knew what I was supposed to do and I understood how I could make it happen, but I kept overlooking something in the code and couldn’t figure out what. And then, a few times, I was able to figure it out. And when I got the program to write “FizzBuzz” instead of 15? Huge endorphin rush. You’d think after all my time spent playing video games that I would be used to that by now, but the spark of pleasure that happens when I figure out how to get out of a room in Portal is very different from what happens when I finally figure out the answer to 63-Down, or when I finally get the code to work. I finally got the code to work! I made something happen on the Internet, sort of! That was cool.

And the people behind Code Year, the people of Codecademy, totally get why that’s cool, and that’s why their crash course in programming is loaded with rewards like badges and achievements. I love it. I have points! I don’t know what the points mean, maybe they’re totally arbitrary, but I have them! They’re mine!

I wish I hadn’t whizzed through the week’s worth of lessons. I want to learn more! I want to work ahead! Ah, the last obstacle in my learning process. You’d think it wouldn’t be an obstacle, but it is. I can’t slow down once I get started on something I’m excited about, and this sometimes leads to breezing past things I should pay more attention to. Something to keep in mind as I move forward.

An ordinary morning

Michelle Wiener — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 12:23:20 +0000

The past couple days have been lovely, blogwise. I got back to writing first thing in the morning — well, first thing after the cats are fed and the coffee’s made — and it was early enough that it was just me and my laptop, cats sitting quietly nearby, no street noise and a dusky dark blue winter morning sky growing gradually lighter.

This morning, however, the cats are playing noisily and I’m disenchanted by the fact that it’s still very dark outside at 7:00 am. Though, you know, good for the cats — it makes me happy that Gypsy and Jayne play together, particularly as Gypsy doesn’t show much interest in playing with humans, and she needs the interaction and exercise. Don’t we all.

And I have nothing in particular to say this morning — no progress to report, no new idea to work through, no spleen to vent. It’s just an ordinary morning.

Nothing wrong with that.

Once more into the breach or whatever.

Michelle Wiener — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 22:55:05 +0000

New month, new goals, one more chance this year at a regular writing schedule, no idea what to write.

I blame AMC for creating a situation that caused Mad Men to delay its fifth season for six months.

I could tell you more about the kittens, who are in their eighth week and healthy and feisty and about to go for their first vaccinations, won’t that be fun.

I could tell you about my recent bout with the plague that seems to be devouring the New York area, with everyone getting flu-like symptoms without it actually being the flu, and not being able to get rid of it for three whole weeks.

I could wax rhapsodic about Skyrim, but I bet most of you really don’t care. (I may do it anyway. So there.) (It’s a video game.)

I could tell you about the time I got engaged this past August. That’s a good story.

Frankly, right now none of these interest me very much as blog fodder. I’m in another one of my “everything is boring and I am the boringest of all” phases, except…not really. Just when I’m faced with writing here. It feels so very been there, done that — even my feeling “been there, done that” feels so been there, done that. And it’s probably my fault for starting to write this post so late in the day, when it’s already dark and however much I would love to be able to embrace the dark, it’s a hard thing to convert to after spending years being my most productive during the morning hours.

So, experiment time. Again. I’ve taken this blog off of most radars, no longer feeding into Twitter or Facebook, at least until I get my sea legs. Again. I kinda like the idea of writing just for me here.

I don’t know why I do this to myself.

Michelle Wiener — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 21:59:28 +0000

So I wasn’t planning on participating in NaNoWriMo this year. I had a disappointing turn last year, and even though I went back to that novel-in-progress over the past year I never finished it and I got bored with it (even though there were certain things I liked about it). And I stopped updating this blog because…because. I had things to write about, but they were personal life things and I wanted to keep them private, and then too much time had passed for them to be relevant (although that’s silly, because of course they’re still relevant, so that’s just a stupid voice in my head telling me not to even try), and then by the time I felt like writing here again everyone who reads this blog already knew my important personal life news, and then it got to the point where I thought “November’s coming, I’ll use November as the month to get back to writing for the blog because I won’t be participating in NaNoWriMo.”

And then last week I thought of an idea for a story, a kind of story I’ve never tried to write before, and my mind kept racing around all the different plot possibilities, and I said to myself, “Oh, hell.”

So here I am. I’m sick (have been for a few days), I’m groggy from sleeping all day, I’m about to pour myself a shot (or two) of whiskey (MEDICINAL) and I have written 417 words of this story so far. But here’s the thing:

I’m not a joiner. I can’t get into the group spirit of NaNo, I hate that there’s yet another website I have to check into, I always delete the pep talk emails without opening them, and I hate the emphasis on word count over anything else important about writing.

It’s not that I don’t agree with the overall philosophy behind “50,000 words in 30 days.” I’ve been writing since I learned how and I know how important it is to just get SOMETHING down, even if you hate it, even if you’re saying to yourself as you’re writing, “this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks I hate myself why am I doing this why didn’t I go to air conditioning repair school” (for example). More often than not, when I’m writing something with purpose I can go back to it and realize that it wasn’t that bad after all. At the very least, there are a couple sentences or phrases that I can work with.

And maybe I’m prickly about the word count because I’ve only reached it once in my four or five years of participating, and even then I wasn’t finished with the story and by that point I hated it so much that I just wanted to be done and I think my last line was “And then they all died THE END.” I thought that somehow reaching 50,000 words would mean something to me, but it didn’t. It just meant that I spent a whole lot of time on something that I was never going to look at again. Did I learn something valuable about writing during that month? Mmmmmm…no. Nothing that I didn’t already know.

It’s not that I regret it. But I had a better experience the next year, when I had an actual plot on which I spent a good deal of time, and I liked my characters and I was amused by what I was writing. But I stopped writing halfway through the month for reasons I don’t remember now. Lethargy, most likely.

But I think that’s significant, that I had a better time writing last year even though I didn’t finish, and I think it’s because I had a plan. It wasn’t the word count that pushed me forward, it was my plot. When I wasn’t sure what to do next, I skipped to a section I knew had to be there.

The other important thing I have learned is that I am not a fiction writer, and I will most likely never become one. But I do want to use this month to rebuild and refocus, and not treat it as a test of my abilities that I will never pass to my satisfaction. I have the ability. I just don’t have the practice.

So I will be writing this month, both here and for this story that may not come to anything and that’s OK. But I’m not going to be on the NaNo website. And I’m not going to worry about word count. I’m not going to worry about finishing by the end of this month. I’m just going to focus on writing.

Happy anniversary, Brooklyn.

Michelle Wiener — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 23:25:44 +0000

I totally blew past an important anniversary a couple weeks ago. This is why memory is stupid. I can remember completely unimportant stuff, like my first phone number and the birthday of my first crush (in third grade, thank you — so wait, actually that makes him my second crush. No, third. OK, I got around back then) and I can remember that important dates are coming up, but unless there’s a bell tied to the actual day? It’s just like any other day.

July 29th was the ninth anniversary of the day I moved to Brooklyn.

It was just as hot as it has been lately, and I had nothing with me except my laptop, my coffee maker, a couple plants, my dissertation materials (remember when I was writing that? Me either. I could barely tell you what it was about now. I still have it saved somewhere…on a ZIP DRIVE. I KNOW), my cat, a yoga mat and a pillow. I was under the assumption that the rest of my furniture would follow close behind. It didn’t, but that’s a story I’ve told many times before and should probably at this point be fictionalized just to stir things up. (Hmmm.)

I didn’t even have a job. I had virtually nothing; just a dissertation fellowship and an inheritance to supplement it — and lest you think I had some moneybags uncle or something, both of those incomes together still came out to basically about poverty level for living here. It was ample for Ohio, where I had been. I knew New York wouldn’t be cheap, yet I was still unprepared for just how not cheap it would be. But even if I’d known, I think my decision to move here would’ve been the same. (I’m stubborn like that.)

So why move, you ask? I don’t have a concrete answer for that. This story has so many permutations for so many different audiences, with different variations of “why.” Right now I can’t come up with anything more substantial than this:

I wanted to.

But really, that’s a pretty substantial reason, when you think about it. It’s a big deal, to live where you want. Brooklyn was the first place I chose. For myself. Not because I had a job here, not because I was going to school here. Because I wanted to live here. I chose it. I thought that out of all the places in the country, Brooklyn and I had the best chance of making a go of it.

And I was right. I figured myself out here, in ways that I don’t think I would have if I were elsewhere. Brooklyn — New York as a whole, if you must — prompted me to see and think about things in ways I never would have thought possible if I were still in the Midwest, and through that learn things about myself that I wouldn’t have otherwise. I’d love to give you an example of this but I can’t think of anything specific. It could be that there’s so much crazy here that I gave myself license to let loose with my own crazy, and everyone here was like, “Cool.” Brooklyn. You get me.

On occasion I still go through phases where I think I want to leave, and I have reached the point where I think under the right circumstances I would willingly move elsewhere, but as long as those circumstances don’t materialize? I am perfectly happy right here.

Happy anniversary, Brooklyn.

So, how’s your recession going?

Michelle Wiener — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 23:57:09 +0000

Don’t worry, I’m not gonna start waxing political. I know enough to get by in polite cocktail party conversation, but as soon as it starts devolving into HEATED DEBATE I don’t have the facts to back up my statements. I guess very few people do. But informed discussion is important to me, so.

(Though I was proud of myself when Dan came home and told me a story that involved the debt ceiling agreement, and I already knew that it was being raised from 14 trillion and change to 16 trillion and change. So there’s that.)

Now that I’ve completely derailed my PLAN of writing EVERY DAY FOR A MONTH — I accidentally fell asleep on Friday afternoon and woke up three or so hours later with my throat positively on FIRE and knew that the only thing to do was to go back to sleep and skip blogging for the day, and then the weekend happened and … you know, the problem with this plan is that there just isn’t enough to talk about. Call it a failure of imagination, but there just isn’t. And I don’t like the idea of vomiting on the page and then linking to it. I mean, that’s basically what this is, but whatever. It’s 90-some degrees outside, I just walked past some very weird shit in my neighborhood (“shit” here is being used figuratively. It wasn’t literal shit. Though that also happened to me over the weekend, walking down the subway station stairs to the C train. Someone had either decided that the stairs were a valid place to take a dump, or couldn’t hold it in any more. Worse, there was a swarm of flies that I inadvertently disrupted and then had to walk through. It was super gross) and I needed to sit down at the computer and write something just to keep myself in the habit. You can stop reading now. Provided you still are.

When I revived the act of blogging I had it in my head that it needed to always be MEANINGFUL, and that wound up hurting me more than anything. One of the victories of this latest experiment, even though it only lasted two weeks, is that I rid myself of that idea. (Obviously.) That I was just going to write, and it didn’t matter if it mattered.

Except it kind of does. What I have finally come to terms with is that without a craft focus, there is no focus. This is a general problem I see in my life at present. I have very little focus. I have a part-time job that doesn’t pay nearly enough and every day I go to this job I feel like I’m losing all ground to stand on for future salary negotiations and I want it on record that I accepted this job because it was A JOB and that was something I hadn’t had in a long, long time, and I am fucking grateful for it but I’m also not insured and I’m 40 years old and goddammit I need another drink.

But there’s another issue: I have too many goddamned platforms. There’s this and Tumblr and Twitter and Facebook and now Google+ and when I wrote about internet fatigue last week (or whenever, I don’t keep track) I was talking more about all the noise I have to sift through to get to the stuff that I want to read about, but I think the real problem is my own noise. My thoughts are spread too thin. I go to Twitter and am overwhelmed and shrink from posting anything (and also btw Twitter, I am still mad at you over the whole domestic violence hashtag you allowed to remain in use for an entire weekend and I’m not returning to you until I’m over that, which may not be ever). I head to Facebook and — well, honestly, I don’t head to Facebook much anymore. And all of my updates are done by proxy, mostly from Tumblr. I love you guys, but Facebook itself drives me up a tree. And Google+ — I want to like it so, so much, but right now it’s just another platform and either the people in my circles don’t post a lot or I am not in their party circles, and that’s fine. The only platform that doesn’t feel like noise to me, the one I turn to first for sharing the random shit that occurs to me, is Tumblr. Why is that?

Maybe it’s that after two years I’ve culled a bunch of people to follow who genuinely interest me and/or make me laugh and/or inspire me, and that’s satisfying the itch I get every few years to shake things up and meet new people and try on new aspects of my personality that have either been in hibernation or hiding.

I dunno. What I do know is twofold: 1) that the Lion OS just ate the original version of this post because my fingers barely grazed the trackpad and Safari thought I wanted to go back a page and then it froze when I tried to reload and I am pissed because I used to write all this shit in TextEdit to avoid internet issues like this but I got lazy; and 2) I’d rather post the things I write here when I really like them. Unlike now. I mean, this is OK. But it was better in the post that got eaten. Isn’t that always the way.

Another post about nothing

Random Wednesday

Michelle Wiener — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 23:27:16 +0000

And thank goodness for that, cause writing a cohesive post about anything right now is a bit beyond me.

Random #1: Though you know why I like blogging after work? Because I get to mix myself a drink first. It’s like a little treat for me, extra incentive, to sit at the computer and do my due diligence. (It also makes cooking dinner more of an ADVENTURE.) Right now I’m drinking a cocktail called the Queen Elizabeth, which is made with dry vermouth, Benedictine, and lime juice (at least according to the Handbook for Hosts). I know, I thought it sounded kinda nasty too, but I tried it and it’s quite refreshing. Quite. (Pro tip: use Benedictine, not B&B.)

Random #2: Someone contacted one of my coworkers today asking if she would email blast all the magazine’s reviewers to see if there was any interest in reviewing books for her company, which offers this “review service” to self-published authors. That’s right: there’s a company (probably more than one) that asks self-published authors to pay to have their books reviewed by this company. It’s not a PR package, where the company seeks out reviews from established places like, say, the magazine where I work, in addition to press releases and other marketing 101 features, all of which the author pays for on retainer or by month or however it works. No. This is a “you pay us to review your book” sort of deal, and the fact that this person contacted US to farm out OUR reviewers? We can all agree that this is unethical on at least two levels, right?

Random #3: Do you think the wizarding world collectively rolled its eyes when Harry Potter named his second son “Albus”? Also, it has bothered me for some time that none of Harry and Ginny Potter’s kids (OK, I’m just assuming Ginny took Harry’s last name, because I think that’s the sort of thing Rowling would have her do) are named for any of the deceased Weasleys.

Random #4: Dan thinks that Nigel the Mouse has a girlfriend. I’m not so sure. Yesterday I saw him and only him, completely dodging the traps we set out. He now takes an entirely different route to the kitchen. So if we line all the walls with traps, do you think he’ll get the hint? “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here”?

Random #5: Somewhat related, have I mentioned yet how much I can’t stand not having a cat? I need a new ball of fluff to play with and wake me up at 5:30 in the morning and leave vomit for me to step in and walk across the laptop when I’m trying to write and snuggle up with me at night and generally be entertaining and an endless source of future Tumblr photo posts. And, you know, maybe catch mice. If he wants.