Scribe

She had seven children to my mother's three, all Ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel who remained within the fold. I was the rebel, the sinner, the one who married a non-Jew and galavanted around New York City with Radical Feminists. And yet, the last time I saw her before she died, my aunt said to me, " I always thought you would write a book about Auschwitz." My parents who semi-disowned me expected the same. No matter what I did to alienate the family, I was the chosen scribe. I couldn't get out of it.

My aunt and my mother had spent a year in Auschwitz as teenagers. My father had spent two years there as a young man. It's smoke-stacks blackened my youth. Which is why trying to write my own stories is like entering a dark blizzard described in the previous post on "ice-road-trucker-writer", and entering the short-shorts of my blog is coming up for light and air and I've tarried here for so long, two years now counting all blogs and it's such a relief.

But now the question is, can short-shorts carry heavy loads of big trucks in small increments? It would be so much easier to face the dark blizzard in short-short form, though there are those long careening icy downhills that just have to be gotten through in the long form, I know, but perhaps some of it, some of it, on little sleds, no?

Detour: Ice-Road-Trucker-Writer

I'm addicted to the reality show Ice Road Truckers. It reminds me of blinding snowstorms I'd drive through in the Adirondacks and Green Mountains when I lived in Vermont and upstate New York, of course nothing like the ice roads of Alaska, but the existential blind faith of plunging ahead in the darkness seeing no farther than the flakes falling on your hood, hypnotically balanced on the tightrope between life and death, and of course I love that a young woman who looks like Avril Levigne is one of the truckers. I love their North Country accents.

Snow blind. I feel like a snow blind writer right now. Feeling my way in a snowstorm. White-out conditions (literally, that White-Out that erases words.) Not so much blocked. I was blocked. Now I'm unblocked. The engine's caught, finally.

I read on a "real" writer's blog that she thinks of writing her first draft as a safe and cozy place of playful fantasy and wonderfulness, like making snow angels. Why then, for me, does it feel like my brakes are locked and I'm careening blindly down an icy hill in a blizzard at night with my extra-wide load, white-knuckling the steering wheel and trying not to fall off the edge of the world?

Real vs Faux Writing

My writing has narrowed down to my blog, which is hardly any writing at all. I read published writers' blogs and most blog about the things they are doing in ADDITION to the hundreds or thousands of words a day they are writing in stories and novels they are sending out and getting even more published, the designs of their covers, the photoshops of their author photos etc. etc. and I have nothing in common to say to them. This makes me feel extremely pathetic. I'm not looking for sympathy or even encouragement. It is in fact just plain pathetic. It means things I don't want to think about right now. There are serious writers who blog their stories or poems nearly every day or several times a week. I barely eke out one decent story a month lately. I am once again starting to go through my old files of longer stories and in the process finding ideas for short-shorts that are more intense than my usual blog posts that I'm not sure I want to post at all and maybe need to set aside like all those published writers who just blog about the process and the light stuff and save their "real" writing for off-line. Seems kind of lonely to me. But writing in general is a lonely pursuit. At least for me it is. Obviously some people find their characters keep them company. I've never liked my characters very much. That must mean something I don't want to think about right now either.

The Cat is the Hat

Everyone looks guilty in my household. Constantly. At least the feline members. There has been a conspiracy lately of leaving various bodily excretions on floors, beds, couches, places you would not want to find such things outside of a litter box. We have narrowed it down to two culprits, but they take turns and at times we are so frustrated we think of getting rid of one, only to imagine finding out that the worst offender was in fact the other. Every time we enter any room of the house, we lead, like a dog, with our nose sniffing, then visually scanning the suspect areas, then feeling for moisture, then either sighing in relief or screaming expletives in anguish and starting once again the scrubbing and washing of layers and layers of bedding and couch covers and cushions. If they weren't so cute, we'd be wearing them as hats by now.

Types of Bloggers

Some people are long-distance bloggers. Some are sprinters. Some are manic-depressives. Others obsessive compulsive. Some are just plain lazy, stopping to lounge around with some iced tea in the shade reading trashy novels. No one I know.

Nothing-to-do-at-Work Stupidity

I've been Googling the competition. Other nothing to do at work sites and posts. There are many, many out there. All stupid. Things like covering your office with yellow stickies or wrapping your entire office in newspaper, sawing your keyboard through your desk, balancing your checkbook, catching up on your personal e-mail. The point is to look busy without getting fired. Those are great ideas if you want to get fired, but I'm assuming in this climate we all want to keep our do-nothing jobs, and that there are times when our do-nothing jobs are quite hectic, with all of us doing five people's jobs. There are just those lulls to get past without looking useless and making the boss wonder whether it's time to include you in the next layoff pool. Someone with stickies on their ceiling and jacket is a sure fire.

Nothing-to-do-at-Work-Day 3: Preventing Hostility

It is a well-known fact that idle hands breed violence. Unemployment has led to revolutions. Not enough work to go around within work places is a breeding ground for viruses of dissent and resentment, gossip and revolt. Gather round the coffee pot and listen to the seething recriminations, or, worse, the silence that suddenly falls as you enter the room. It's palpable. People whisper and hiss as soon as someone is out of earshot. Everyone claims to hate the boss, but suddenly there are spies jockeying for position as favorites by reporting on anti-boss activity. Nothing-to-do-at-Work-Days are not an innocuous problem for an organization. They are insidious, divisive, and lead to more than a few irreparable conflicts and scars that impede the smooth efficiency of the organization once there is again actual work to do. So be forewarned, employers, keep a backlog of meaningless work for your employees to do when there is no real work. Charts, surveys, questionnaire development, data collection and coding, all garbage that goes straight to the shredder will maintain the health of your organization for years to come.
See also:
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Manuscript Rejections #2 and #3

I can't remember how many manuscripts I sent out. I could go to my little very organized file boxes, one for journals and one for manuscripts, and find out, but I don't want to know. It's either twenty or thirty. Multiple submissions of course. But short-shorts, so a lot of different ones, and three per shot.

And already I'm feeling like I'll need a different strategy, this isn't going to work.

They send one reject slip for all three stories, or just write the name of the first story on the slip so I start thinking well, maybe they just rejected that one, but I know the truth. Still, I keep the whole thing in the back of my mind, way back, with the dust bunnies, the cat fur, the old fingernail clippings. When one of those envelopes in my own handwriting arrives in the mail as wanted as dog poop on my shoe, thinner even than an empty envelope if that is possible, usually rained on, looking like it had been stomped on a few times too, I feel I have to wash my contaminated hands after opening it. They surely irradiated it to keep people like me from continuing to write.

So I'm thinking, this short-short business is hopeless. I have to go back to working on my long stories, the boring melancholy ones full of sad orphans who tell funny jokes. That's what journals want. Long short stories. They want filler. They don't want to waste time on these little miniatures. Do you know how much work that would require?

So, must a writer of short-shorts write long-shorts to be taken seriously as a short-short writer? Must any writer contort him or herself into a mold first in order to get a foot in the door so that her "real" work can get a chance at an audience? Can writing to fit a mold even work if your heart isn't in it? I don't know. Maybe I can find a way to write a long short that's a series of short-shorts. I think a lot of writers do that. Pam Houston, Margaret Atwood, Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel (whose short shorts are made up of shorter shorts). Writers are creative people. There's got to be a way to be strategically creative about getting published.

I know one thing: we shouldn't give up.

Them

I hate the way adults generalize about "adolescents" like we were a herd of sheep. How would they like it if we talked like that about them, you know, like all parents are like one big gob with no individuality at all. And the way they like to say that we all are trying to find ourselves but at the same time we are all looking for approval from our peers. Like how does that make any sense? Like they're the ones who have lost themselves in their gob of adulthood looking and thinking all the same, talking the same, coming up with the exact same excuses for the exact same rules. I mean if they ever found any individuality in the first place they certainly have lost it by now.

Congratulations!

Dear Disorganized Workshopping Poet:
We have designated you with the highest honor since Albert Einstein was given the same designation in the arena of physics. Have you seen his desk by any chance? The term "workshop" has been demeaned by the current use in writing programs and bears no relation whatsoever to the original meaning of the word in which the most highly skilled in a trade set up a workshop so that, say, you would be tap, tapping out your poetry next door to a shoemaker tap, tapping out his shoes, say, next door to Michelangelo's workshop. All art arises from chaos, order from disorder. I know that, you know that, all artist's know that but forget that when idiots in power hypnotize our insecurities.

We need strategies, that's all. I keep shifting mine. It's merely time to shift yours. I'll be writing soon about my shift. Meanwhile, buck up. I do have some ideas for you. Like take some of your poems that are not part of your epics, that lovely poem about the ghost in the window from last June and send it to a ton of places. Send three small poems at a time to lots of reputable literary magazines. Don't say who you are or what you've done, just your name. Keep the poems conservatively beautiful. Build up a publication record and only then try to get a book published. That's my current strategy only a little different. I'll get to it. You are blessed. We are not born strategists. That, too, is a blessing.

Ms. Squirrel