New Year Hopes for the Blogworld

Here are three hopes I have for the blogworld:

ONE: For more authors who blog to be sassier, and try a little harder to present topics that appeal both to writers and readers.

TWO: For Karin Gillespie's books to soar to the top of the best-seller lists. Because Karin works hard to keep her blog topical, and takes the time to encourage writers and readers by providing links and insight to the joys and frustration of being a new author. Go, Karin.

THREE: For myself to start blogging more often and more generally.

Those are my hopes for the blogworld in the new year. Now the hopes for my personal life...well, that's another entry.

Should I Be Flattered...or Not?

Yesterday, I checked my email and there was an email from a "representative" of Xilbris; this person had read my Becoming Shadows blog, and "found [my] writing to have tremendous potential and impact."

Unh. Hunh.

Well, Xilbris is a vanity press. Yes, a "publisher" that I pay instead of the other way around (and the more respectable way.)

The email was a shock, because my Bel Esprit blog is not "out there" yet, and probably has only one consistent reader (thanks, MJ), and my Becoming Shadows blog has been abandoned to continue my work under less scrutiny. So, how this "representative" found my blog is most likely from the NaNoBlogMo blog, where every NaNo participant who shared the URL to their blog probably received the same email and found that their writing, too, has "tremendous potential and impact."

I was discussing with my brother about how being a self-published author is way less respectable than a musician who decides to hawk copies of a labored CD from the trunk of his or her car. Hey, Ani DiFranco, Jay-Z and countless other musicians have done it, and it's considered a terrific grassroots effort to stardom. But...in publishing, ha! Self-publishing is a LAST RESORT. Either the author's book is not marketable or before its time or just plain leaky.

I know there are authors who have self-published successfully. And if their work is up to par, then most of these authors are scooped up by a "real" publisher. Making self-publishing sound even more small-time and desperate.

My motto: If I can't land a publisher the traditional way, and get paid for my work, then I just wont be published. Plain as that. So, no thank you, Xilbris.

Okay, that's all. I'm off to listen to Fantasia Barinno's "Summertime" for the tenth time this morning, and work on Chapter Nine of Becoming Shadows.

Happy Holidays!

I'd like to wish everyone a happy and safe holiday season and New Year. Please, don't drink and drive, drink and fight or drink and become a raging lunatic, taking up three lanes of traffic because the police has pulled you over and found you ass-naked in -50 below zero weather, doing bunny hops. And Nigel is yelling at me because I keep shouting out the window "Arrest him or let the show go on."
Oh yeah, don't drink too much at the holiday party either, and shout out the window at the police and an inebriated idiot.

Oh, memories of 2003's New Year's eve.

More on the Apprentice Fiasco

Okay, so Nigel starts reminding me that The Apprentice will be re-airing on CNBC, and that I should take a look at it "without biased eyes." Nigel wanted me to sit down and watch the show again and to "pay particular attention to how Kelly handles crisis compared to Jen."

Fine. So I did.

And after watching the show again, I'm even more pissed off. Yes, the boardroom was hellish, but even more perturbing is the guy from X-box who went psycho on Jen because the power blew. Now, granted, I know the company was "spending a lot of money on this," and it was Jen's duty to make sure every aspect of the event was in order -- including engineering. BUT...I just know if Jen had been a man, that guy would have been more understanding that SHIT HAPPENS, and everything can't just fall together. He probably would have joked around, told Kelly: "Hey, do your best, but we need to get this power going." Instead of being very nasty to Jen by saying: "I don't want your people coming to me asking me anything. Fix the problem now."

And what did Nigel say after I made this very same point to him? "I think the guy would have been even nastier to Kelly, because he wouldn't have to be as gentle to man."

Argh! I give up.

So for the sake of both our sanity, we've decided to just drop it, and focus our collective energy into hoping Maurice from The Biggest Loser wins. Hey, that will be two for three: Eva from America's Next Top Model and Maurice. I got my fingers crossed.

Harvard and Princeton Degrees vs the YWM Degree

Last night, a couple friends, Mama Hausen, and Nigel and I all got together to watch The Apprentice finale. It was a night of debating, wine, and one friend accusing me of being a "liberal, feminist nazi!" Nevertheless, the night was fun, but the outcome of the show weighed on my mind all night and now this morning. Why on earth didn't Jennifer M. win, I keep thinking, she's well educated, has almost the same experience as Kelly, she's tough....

Actually, I came to my answer last night: Trump is sexist. The world is sexist. Jennifer Massey didn't win because she is a woman. Face it. Last night's show should have been called The Kelly Perdue 3-Hour Finale, because for three hours all we heard was unremitting praise for Kelly, interspersed with a speckle of brave souls who spoke up for Jennifer's abilities.

It was disgusting, and I let everyone in my house know that I thought it was sickening what was going on. But no one agreed with me, not even my mother.

Mama Hausen: "Amy, Kelly was more organized, and he's business savvy."

Nigel: "You're looking at with biased eyes. You've been calling Trump sexist through-out the whole show."

Friend 1 (male): "If you think Jen M. deserved to win, then you're out of it."

This went on all night.

You know what bothered me the most? The live boardroom meeting. Jennifer went into why she was well qualified to the job. She recited her lovely education, that she'd went into a very competitive legal market in San Francisco.... And Trump acted inpressed, even chiding Kelly for not having "better" credentials. So Trump asks Kelly why should he pick him over Jen. And the look on Kelly's face said: "Because I am Young, White, and Male." As if that would have been enough. I guess it was.

The YWM degree has way more precedence over an Ivy League education attained by any woman or minority. The YWM degree cannot be...well, trumped.

What the Hell are We So Depressed About?

A friend of mine has been given a prescription for Wellbutrin XL, an anti-depressant. And she's been fretting for days about whether to have the prescription filled: "Amy, I didn't think I needed medication," she said during lunch.

"Then don't have it filled." I replied.

"Yeah, but Dr. ______ thinks it will help take the edge off the day."

Yuck. It's that type of mentality that has half of the country medicated. Everyone's trying to take the "edge" off the day. What exactly is the edge of the day, anyway? Is it having to rise in the morning and go pay some bills? Or maybe it's having to look after your children. Is it facing humanity that's so arduous, with all its idiosyncrasies and expectations? I just don't think there is a definitive explanation why so many people are being told they're depressed and that said depression needs medication. Even children as young as ten are being prescribed anti-depressants.

And what the hell are we so depressed about anyway? Is it because we can't live up to other's expectations of us? If we can't keep our weight under 110 pounds or our skin one fine line freer, our children in tip-top academic and filial duty Shangri-la or keep our marriages in the honeymoon stage, then, by GOD, someone medicate us!.

What do we think our grandparents did before anti-depressants? Just fucking killed themselves? No, they got through it. Naturally.

The path of medicating anything that gets in the way of us being a super-human is getting out of hand. Children are on Ritalin and anti-depressants, adults now have AADD and "debilitating" depression, and, guess what, there's a magic pill that will stop the pain of being human and make us all feel better.

And in the midst of it all: humanness. No amount of medicine can change that. Women still bleed every twenty-eight days, we still have to defecate, eat to survive; we still have to be human. So what the hell is all this medicine doing for us? Let me guess: taking the edge off the day, right?

Citizen Girl Wears Prada from the Devil

I just finished Citizen Girl and I hated it. Absolutely hated it. While reading through it, I felt like I was in the same Devil Wears Prada nightmare I'm still recovering from. Yuck.

The girls (McLaughlin and Kraus) must have had dinner with Lauren Weisberger and said: "Hey, you sold in the hundred thousands, we sold in that range, too -- wanna be our silent partner?"

What as disappointment. It feels like the crap Devil... all over again. For shame!

Alisa, My Sweet, Forgive Me

I was over at ALISA Valdes-Rodriguez's blog, when it occured to me that I'd been referring to her as ALICIA. How this managed to happen puzzled me. In fact, I'd even written in the comment section of her blog and called her Alicia. I'd gone so far as to link to her weblog with the wrong name in the address. I was shocked. Shocked because I have both of Alisa's books sitting on my shelf, I visit her blog daily, and at one point when I'd first discovered Dirty Girls Social Club I did an online search of her name with the proper spelling.

So how could I just up and freakin' forget her first name?

Well, it's a case of human oversight. It's happen to me before with another author. Does anyone know who Jennifer Crusie is? Well, I'd discovered her genius while browsing for books at a bookstore downtown. Hmm...I've never heard of Jennifer CRUISE, I thought. Maybe I should check her out. So I picked up a copy of Fast Women, took it home, and immersed myself in Jennifer's work. Oh, I love how she's defining Nell's vulnerability. I think I'm going to be a Jennifer CRUISE fan after this., I thought as I continued to root for Nell and Gabe to heat up Ohio with their grooves. Long story short, I finished the book and let it sit on my nightstand for a couple days before I started The Re-read. I looked at the cover of the book and admired the tea cups and lipstick, the maroon script-writing of the title, and then at her name. CRUISE...That's not CRUISE, it's CRUSIE!

And now my latest victim: Alisa.

Science has an explanation for this, which I'm too lazy to do research on it right now, but I know it entails something about the human eye seeing, at times, what a word sounds like than what it actually is. And Alisa looks similar to Alicia, and Cruise looks awfully close to Crusie. Something like that, I think.

Anyway, what surprises me the most about this mix-up is no one bothered to correct me, which leads me to think others were inflicted with the same condition. Or didn't want to come off whiny. But how I wished Alisa would have just written back something snarky in the comments section where I called her Alicia. Something like, "Ms. Hausen, when you find Alicia Valdes-Rodriguez, let me know."

Sadly, I was allowed to continue to make a fool of myself. So in a frenzy, I erased all my comments where I referred to her as Alicia, fixed the link to her blog, and I'm hoping Alisa forgives the faux pas.

More Sassy Blogs Needed?

My mother always used to say whenever I had a piece to spout: "Amy, the world spins on opinions." It was an obscure caveat, reminding me that having an opinion is nothing special.

My mother wanted a daughter who could look at things objectively yet not lose the natural human instinct of subjectivity. She wanted a daughter who could be critical but not in an ad hominem way, more so in a logical manner. And finally she wanted a daughter who wouldn't be afraid to take on something bigger than herself and have the balls (well, in essence) to tell it: screw you, I have something to say. Listen or bugger off.

Clearly, I make Mama Hausen quite proud.

And so I want my blog to be a blog that isn't afraid to "go there." Although, I wish I had more time to blog, to write about my issues and likes and dislike, but between keeping Nigel happy, writing a novel, and work, it can be a little hard to update daily.

I tell you, I envy bloggers who are able to write three or four entries a day; I have a certain respect for these bloggers. I respect them because I know they love doing it -- blogging can become addictive to the point where every little thought that rears its process makes it on the blog.

I aspire to reach that form of blog nirvana.

Meanwhile, I wish there were more sassy book blogs out there; book blogs that aren't afraid to say so-and-so sucks, his books are trifling, overwrought, dopey duds.

With that in mind, I think there's a huge fear of karma in the book world. I believe authors think if they say something not favorable about a "respected author" then it's going to come back to bite them in the (argh...must avoid the cliché) tooti-taati.

But being a sassy blogger doesn't have to be mean-spirited. As long as one doesn't make it personal and stick to the author's work, then being an objectively critical book blogger would be a breath of fresh air in the book blog universe.

Or maybe I haven't blog-shopped enough. Maybe there are quite a few book blogs spinning on opinions; I just have to look.

Book Lovers: Becoming Extinct?

It saddens me that books are dying. And dying the worst kind of death, too -- slow, desperate, and painful. It's becoming harder to chat up a co-worker about Joyce Carol Oates' latest or share musings on The Poisonwood Bible. People are just not reading as much as they used to.

It's easy to see why: with the influx of instantly gratifying things like the Internet, TiVo, DVDs and reality television, it seems curling up with a book is A., too time consuming, and B., old-fashioned. It now feels like people are buying books just to see if said book lives up to its hype. Which is a really bad place for authors and books and readers to be.

I guess I'm upset that fiction sales are declining, and now one has to write about forensics or murder or both in order to register on a best-seller list. Plus, I'm smarting over the numerous articles that keep reminding me that 20,000 is the new million. When back in the day (you choose a date), 20,000 copies sold was considered bomb-status.

I'm sure this decline of books probably started in the '50s, when television swept the land and one could view characters in live action, with the help of a clunky box and an antenna, instead of in a thick, cozy novel.

Being honest: books are a time-consuming product. A reader can't just flop down on the couch and flip to a chapter and say, "Okay, that's enough for the week." A reader wants to continue the story, often staying up to the wee hours of aurora to take in as much as they can about the book. And of course, there's that Book Guilt thing to deal with -- a condition thrust upon us from the young Seuss ages, where we were derogated by our peers if we didn't finish a book. It was as if not finishing a book was some testament to our apparent dumbness, our inability to stay focused or entertained by words on a page (which now is being called ADD, and comes with medication). I fear people just don't want to subject themselves to it. Nor are they willing to shell out $20-$30 on something that takes up their precious time or keeps them from enjoying the latest CSI show.

It irritates me that television shows and movies are now the "new books"; they're condensed offerings at vastly cheaper prices and with a broader appeal. While we book lovers continue to diminish and search desperately for someone to discuss The Rule of Four with.

Books and their lovers are becoming increasingly isolated. And it seems our extinction is damn near imminent.

"...Stay Yo Ass at Home..."

This post will veer away from my usual laments on writing, and focus on my biggest peeve in the entire system of life! Some people may disagree with me, but I believe you'll find it hard to disagree with the logic of what I'm going to say. And logic is my ultimate goal with whatever I write and say.

I have a major issue with public figures who can't believe the "publicness" that comes with being known. From A-listers like Julia Roberts to Z-listers, where most authors fit, sans the Kings, Grishams and Collins'. How many times do you hear: "I'm entitled to my privacy?"

My response to that: Fair. But you should have thought about your precious privacy BEFORE you decided to embark on a public career. Now, I'm not saying you're not entitiled to your privacy, we all are; what I'm saying is don't complain about how you fear for the safety and sanctity of your family and children because people know too much about you. That's part of being a public person. People become fans, they want to know more about you, they buy your stuff.

That's the ultimate goal whether a public person wants to admit it or not. They want adulation, people to adore them and their work, but when all this starts to happen, and they begin to reap the benefits of this new found fame and fortune...oh, boy, all that love doesn't seem so great anymore. Having to deal with these people who admire you is getting in the way of you spending all that new money, and hanging out with your more "elite" group of friends. Too bad.

Patti LaBelle put it best: "If you don't want to be seen, stay yo ass at home." It was her advice to the new wave of pop-sluts and R&B-whores, which essentially meant: either sing, perform, and enjoy the ride of fans and money and fame, or get the fuck out of the business.

That means: Don't make another album, don't write another book, don't do another movie. Ditch it all and go live your private life. Move on, because there is always someone willing to take your place (and most likely more talented). You want your privacy so badly? Then give it all up. Do something less public; go back to being a "little person."

But either enjoy the ride, the fans, the money, the adulation or stay yo ass at home.

Oh...to Be an Editing-Whore!

If there is one time in your life when you want to be a whore, it's when it comes to editing your written work. Sadly, I am not a whore. But I want to be an editing-whore, because then I won't have to login to Blogger and fix little mistakes like adding an a to dilating and fixing skipped pronouns and qualifiers.

No, people, what you are getting is raw writing.

To be cheesy about the whole matter: I am nothing but a vessel for the creative lifesource; for she drips her nectar of craft onto my fingetips, and I am nothing but a rudderless slave to her whimsicality, her mercurial wind. Her name is Muse.

And Muse often says, "Fuck editing. Write, my dear, write."

Of course, I have to clean up her mess.

New Template, New Chapter....

The new template is up. I hope it's a better choice than my last pink disaster. Hey, I love pink just as much as the next girl, but it was too much. There is such a thing as too much pink, you know.

Also, I've posted some of CHAPTER TWO at Becoming Shadows. I tell you, it was fun to chuck the forced crap I'd written over the weekend for the intriguing (at least for me it is) direction I'm going in. It's only 800+ words, but it's 800+ words I feel good about.

On the homefront: Nigel has started referring to me as "The Authoress." He says he finds it sexy when I'm sauntering around with pad and pen, scribbling ramdom thoughts and then making a mad dash to the computer to write down the gem that had just revealed itself to me. At least he's supportive. It's not many men out there who will massage your neck as you type, and forgo sex, just so you can Edit.

I, blessed.

Blogger HELL!

I've been trying to blog for three days now. No matter how much I tried to login, I couldn't. Frustrating.

Chapter Two of Becoming Shadows is coming along nicely, soon...it'll be ready to post. Thanks to all for the encouraging emails.

CHAPTER ONE Almost Completed

I've been hard at work on the first chapter of Becoming Shadows, and it's just about where I am feeling comfortable with it.

So far, writing has been FUN, and I hope it stays like this for a long time.

Wednesday morning, the first chapter will be posted at the Becoming Shadows blog.

New Template Coming Soon

If you don't mind.

New Title, New Outlook

It's been brewing and stewing inside my head for a week: my NaNoWriMo contribution (if I can call it that). I've been so busy lately that last night I questioned my sanity for wanting to do this. "Honey, it's something you've been TALKING about all week," said Nigel. It's true. He's had to put up with my questions and thoughts and attempts at making an outline (which ultimately failed. I guess I'm not an outliner).

So at 9:00 a.m I'll start the first chapter of Becoming Shadows, and wing it from there.

In a way, this is all so exciting; but on other hand, it's frightening too -- that I'll be sharing my raw, unedited writing with strangers.

The first chapter will be posted HERE and will be updated three or four times a week. Remember to stay tuned to Bel Esprit for my feelings, thoughts, and frustration on this beautifully frightening journey.

Title Crazy!

I am praising my self for not making the web address to my NaNoBlogMo blog the title of my novel. Because now I'm not sure I want to keep that title. I keep repeating it back to myself and it just doesn't roll off my tongue the way I would like my title to. In fact, it sticks to the tongue. The beginning "All Is" is like glue.

So, I've thought and thought and thought: Does the title have to be static? I can always change it later, right? Isn't the title of a novel just as important as the story? These are all questions I've aksed myself these last couple of days.

Any thoughts?

Idea Brigade: Blessing or Curse?

I have so many ideas for my NaNoWriMo/NaNoBlogMo that I'm getting stressed out trying to figure out which ones to write about. There is one idea that keeps coming to me that seems to stick around more than the others. It's not so much an idea as it is voices (no, I'm not crazy...I don't think.) Right now I have three women floating around in my head and each woman has a different feel to her. The key to making this idea work is to create a story that ties these three women together.

So far, their personalities are fascinating me.

My current emotion about thinking about wtiting: Joy. I'm sure this will end when I actually have to write the story, but I tell you, the thinking part is fun...and powerful. Writing has a wonderful power, almost a power trip quality. It's the only place where you get to be God.

My current frustration: The brigade of ideas. All you published authors out there, tell me: is this a blessing or a curse? It's like a kid in a...well, you know what. Do I pick that one or this one? Then I take a breath and another tasty morsel of fiction presents itself to me. Oh, the choices, the choices.

Discipline, thou art slippery.

My NaNoBlogMo

Yes...I'm going there. So what if I only have just a title? Who knows what creative juices may be flowing come November. Check out All Is Right in Love.

So, starting November Bel Esprit will be all about writing a novel. I'll share my joys, frustrations, and Eureka! moments with all.

First Post

This is my first blog. After reading several wonderful blogs this year, I think I have garnered enough education in the art of blogging. I'm not quite sure if I have a theme for this blog...but I think I will most likely write about pop culture, writers, and books. There may occasionally be a post about a moment in my life or about planning a wedding. I might even dabble in politics. Or I just may chuck the whole thing, possibly. I can be quite capricious.

Indebt me to you, One.