Free Advice From yrmama

Butter Knives

2015-08-10T09:54:00.000-07:00

According to your little criminal you can put a round peg in a square hole if the hole is big enough.

She's correct. But to enlarge the hole might require a lot of you. If the other shoe is always about to drop and all sorts of hell are about to break loose and your ship never comes in you probably feel as though you are whittling with a butter knife. And you are. It's more like holding the butter knife in a shaky paw and distressed by it's odd heft. There is no faith in the isolation ward where you've locked yourself.

Sandy's for the Insecure

2015-08-06T10:26:00.000-07:00

So everyone could choose a sandwich that was under a dollar which meant a hamburger or a cheeseburger, and we'd get one order of fries to share. The Mom would count the fries out and divide them five ways, which amounted to four or five each. Woo hoo. yrmama liked just ketchup and pickles, the others were all more daring, onion bits and mustard too. The works. Later, if we were lucky, there'd be a stop at the day old bread store to pick a Hostess fruit pie (cherry, apple or blueberry) from the big bin. Along with bread the mom would get a box of Ding Dongs or Ho Hos or Twinkies for the rest of the week.

We always ate sitting in the car in the parking lot, but someone had to go in and place the order at the counter. The mom didn't like to go. The dad had no say.

"yrmama, it's your turn."

"No thanks." yrmama was maybe eight, or ten.

"But why not? It's easy. And it's good practice, you just say..."

"No." There was no way. yrmama's head would pop off. She'd rather go without lunch.

"But that's so silly. Don't be so shy."

"I don't want to." Fine, yrmama was shy, but she had better social skills than anyone else in the family. That didn't mean she would fall for being forced to walk into Sandy's alone, and speak for the whole family in front of all those strangers. Town people. Regular people.

"You do it," said the dad to the mom.

"You do it," the mom said to the older brother.

"No! Why should I have to do it?" the older brother would protest as he got out of the car clutching a few crumpled, sweaty dollar bills. He secretly loved it. Before he closed the door he'd add, "yrmama can't do it because she's too shy."

While the dad nursed customary annoyance the mom would sigh in admiration at her nearly perfect son.

Feeding the Cows of Fictionalization and The Interpreter of Maladies.

2015-08-05T10:57:00.000-07:00

So the plan might be to outline this percolating new novel idea, then copy all the parts of the current novel that fit into a new document, then use the memoirish things yrmama's been writing as silage to be consumed by the cows of fictionalization over the winter.

Imagine, a novel in which none of the parts make her neither skim nor cringe -
It would constitute her third full novel, which is starting to be a healthy amount of practice. She felt she had nothing much to say fictionally until she was over forty, which is fair, ten years is not an unreasonable tenure as these things appear to go. A good number of rather successful writers have waited until they are of a decent age...(which does little to assuage the irksomeness of worrying that one's time may be passing one by). yrmama has been busy with other worthwhile life pursuits.

Before we descend into defensive wallowing let's point out the The Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri is quite worthwhile. It is a collection of short stories about people living on the margins between cultures, a delightful place in which to find fictional individuals. In this case it was probably better as a set of short stories than an entire novel - the intersecting observations was like circling around the topic and looking at it from different angles. And in Ms. Lahiri's case, delightfully detailed angles, a crumb here, a tidbit there, like tapas ought to be.

Hobunk Junction...

2015-08-04T12:16:00.000-07:00

If Brenda Trax, Heiress, were a coming of age story set near Hobunk Junction, Iowa in the early 1980's would anyone mistake the hyper-truth of fiction for the mundane truth of historical fact? Would it be able to include a reimagining of the trope in which the long lost dad reappears? Rather than him causing minor trouble and being accepted because after all, he's her father, in this version she discovers that a relationship with the long longed-for father is unworkable, and there's a good reason why she didn't know him before now. Besides, in the current version it's easy to mistake the protagonist saving herself, which was yrmama's intention, for being saved by the boy.

"Hobunk Junction" is actually kind of brilliant because Urban Dictionary says Hobunk refers to a certain group of "hill-folk" of the Minnesotan frontier. And a website devoted to something called Belegarth (www.geddon.org/Belegarth) says Hobunk is the god of falling down and dropping things. And "Brenda," that's the name of another of yrmama's alter-egos, a name that trips off her tongue as if it were her own. (Not that she likes it, it just has a solid, mid-century muscular-thighed feel.)

There's nothing to lose by reworking or hybridizing parts of the novel because there hasn't exactly been a bidding war over it's publication. Maybe it's truly unfinished, a kind way of saying parts of it still suck a little. Nothing to lose. Nothing at all. Perhaps threatening to "finish it" in this manner will light a psychic fire under the few small presses who have not yet rejected me it.

Do. Or do not. There is no try.

Tipping

2015-07-31T08:20:00.000-07:00

This hand infographic is from Jezebel.com

yrmama dutifully admired her new haircut with a hand mirror with a slow spin in the twirly chair then followed her haircut lady up to the register. She declined to pre-schedule the next appointment and pulled her Mastercard out of her handy phone case while the haircut lady rang her up.

"Do you want a receipt?"

"No thanks."

OMG she's going to hand me the slip and I forgot to pre-figure the tip. 20%? Move the decimal one place = 10%, then double it...okay it's $47.50. Shit it's an odd number and a fraction as well. Now what? There's a seven. Seven times two is fourteen, round it up to be generous, fifteen. Add $15. Now for the adding. Meanwhile the haircut lady is politely waiting. Shit, carry the one, scribble out the five that looks like a two and make it a five. Okay, it's added but she's waiting for me! No time to double check! It's a fucking timed test and everyone else is done! Pencils down!

So once again I've overtipped. A while back I had a similar incident and ended up giving her about 40%. Out of mortification I then simply didn't tip at all for a few haircuts. So now she thinks I'm really weird and give huge tips but only occasionally. Perhaps the graceful way out is to find a new haircut lady, but then she'll think I don't like her work, which isn't true.

WWYD?

Mastering the Kale Smoothie

2015-07-30T08:09:00.001-07:00

Blackberry seeds render it pebbly.
Curly kale is too chewy.
Orange juice balances the bitterness.
Blueberries make it dinosaur-colored.
A banana disappears into the maelstrom.
Parsley and kiwis are in short supply.
The dishwasher cannot dislodge kale specks from plastic or glass.
Cucumbers are a bad idea.
Melon is insipid.
Pineapple is positive.
Chia lends slime.

Prologue

2015-07-29T11:39:00.000-07:00

yrmama considers a prologue. Not the car, but a prologue to her brilliant novel - a fresh beginning followed by a freshened ending. The protagonist really, really doesn't need a man to save her, but she does have to trust, at least momentarily, that there are people who are interested in helping her. Pathological independence will only take you so far, and one of the places it will try to take you is into a deep hole.

To prologue or not to prologue? If the prologue is set in the present and the rest of the story is set in the past, the present is prologue. Or, actually, the past is prologue but you read them out of order.

Who will publish the sucker? Will she stoop to self-publishing? Will she wear out her welcome with every prospect by submitting the work as finished when it is in fact not? How will she know when it is finished? Should that storyline about finding a photograph of her father and seeing he is not what she thought and therefore nor is she, be removed? Mostly, is the boyfriend a red herring? Boyfriends are real, and can be worthwhile, but they aren't the answer.

That Was Sometime Other Than Now

2015-07-28T10:39:00.001-07:00

Annie Hall is worthwhile. But referring to your analyst makes you feel like Woody Allen, of whom you once had a very, very large picture in your apartment. Three feet high, and at the time, unbeknownst to you he was behaving in all sorts of questionable ways with his family.

To paraphrase Ann Lamott, maybe he and your parents should have tried raising Yorkies instead of children.

And John Hiatt observes, Maybe your mama didn't treat you right. Maybe her intentions weren't even very good. Maybe your daddy laid awake at night, imagining himself in some other neighborhood.

You weren't allowed to get a big head. Like Woody Allen, three feet high.

You eat nails for breakfast. You keep your socks pulled up. You have fulfilled your parent's aspirations. They now want something more from you but none of you can quite figure it out.

You were left to your own devices, like maybe they were too. You are channelling John Hiatt again, out on the open road and wondering what to do. Don't ask how we got here, baby, don't ask how, that was sometime other than now.

Worthwhile Things:

2015-07-27T12:28:00.000-07:00

(Even though yrmama has been instructed by her analyst to stop evaluating the things that she values. She is supposed to just accept them.)

Bettyville, by George Hodgman

A nice young man takes care of his mother during her final months. The events are strung together in a sufficiently insightful and self-deprecating narrative to make it entirely worth reading.

The Rooms of Heaven, by Mary Allen

Ms. Allen writes about the suicide of an old boyfriend in a way that is not remotely humorous but still does not make one cringe. The camera stays securely inside her own mind. You can learn about her quirky and effective writing techniques by attending a workshop too.

The city of Vancouver appears to be worthwhile.

Mr. Holmes

- a movie starring Ian McKellen about an elderly Mr. Holmes, struggling with a failing memory, fictional accounts of himself and his exploits and drafting a truer narrative about the events of his last case and the completion of his life. It ends with a lovely image of him doing some sort of yoga/liturgical dance-type moves in a grassy field surrounded by some very symbolic stones. When you view this film try not to be seated next to a tall stranger man who thinks all the armrests are his armrests. It is viscerally stressful to try to make oneself small for the two hours of a fairly slow-moving story.

You'll also want to subscribe to The Sun.

And if you are an overly sensitive person of artistic sensibility,

you might want to consider drafting a memoir of your own as a spiritual exercise in stringing together objective facts into a meaningful narrative. The facts are just the facts but the story can be told in any number of ways.

That's about it. If you know of anything else do tell.