Crazy World of Pinterest

If you haven't been on Pinterest, you should have a visit, just to see how strange our society really is.  It's a website that allows you to "pin" a picture and web link to a virtual board.  It can be addictive, but I've found that, due to the repetitive nature of what gets pinned, the novelty wears off fairly quickly.

Repetitive?  Oh, yes.  According to Pinterest, our society is obsessed with the following: food, dresses, food, decorating, food, braiding hair, food, alcohol, food, eye shadow, food, jokes, food, exercise, and food.

If you look up my boards on Pinterest (there are no Facebook-like privacy settings, so feel free), you'll see that I mostly pin recipes, which isn't terribly shocking considering my obsession with cooking.  Look up anybody you like and you'll see what makes them hit that "Pin It" button.  For instance, a few months ago I came across the Pinterest profile for the wife of a friend of mine.  She'd pinned a bazillion pictures of children and child-rearing tips, even though she has no children of her own.  I hope he knows he has fatherhood in his future.  

In fact, most of the people on Pinterest are women, so I'm a little concerned by all the pictures of nearly naked women on there.  They all have a comment under them like "Great diet tips!" or "How to lose weight in a healthy way!"  Really?  Is seeing a woman in a bikini with hips like an adolescent boy and no body hair an incentive to exercise?  Frankly, it makes me want to sit and have another cookie (according to the Pinterest picture at right, cookies should be pink!).

One of the most consistent trends I've noticed on Pinterest is that you can serve anything in a canning jar.  What?  You didn't know that canning jars were vital to a well-laid party spread?  Oh, ho ho!  Yes, indeed.  Canning jars are not just for jam and pickles any more.

Why, just look at the following:

I've never liked oatmeal, but perhaps that's because
I never ate it cold out of a canning jar!

A wash tub filled with bottles of beer or cans of soda is not enough.
You must serve a variety of mixed beverages in canning jars! 

Salad in a mason jar.  Why?  Because bowls are so 2010!

A few weeks ago I gave you a link to a website featuring Weight Watcher recipe cards from the 1960s.  The site makes fun of the absurdity of the recipes and the absolutely appalling way that food was staged for photography back then.  A few minutes on Pinterest, however, and I've come to the conclusion that nothing has changed.  We're still making crazy recipes and serving them as weirdly as possible.

So have fun on Pinterest, and may all your cookies be pink and all your oatmeal come in a Mason jar.

Jane, Jane

I'm an Anglophile.  I've read lots of British literature and have been working on the quality of my faux-British accent for decades (it's way better than Madonna's).  I love fish and chips and British ale and tea and digestives and the absolutely adorable way that British people are so inappropriately polite.  Most of all I love British humor and British accents.

When I'm sick or recovering from surgery as I have been recently, I tend to get all the BBC versions of Jane Austen's novels on DVD and watch them.  Jacob came out of his office the other day and asked me if I had been watching an Austen movie.  

"Yes.  How did you know?" I asked.

"You're speaking with a British accent."

Oh.  Right.

My favorite book of all time is Jane Eyre.  I've loved it ever since I read it when I was a kid, and it amazes me how completely different it is every time I read it.  My long-suffering husband even read it aloud with me a few months ago, and we had a fabulous time with the vocabulary.  I'm positive that Charlotte Bronte made some of those words up.  

The latest film adaptation, although a very simplified version, is really lovely.  Michael Fassbender is far too attractive to be playing the role of Mr. Rochester, but I didn't mind at all.

I should probably stop watching that movie.

I also love Jane Austen novels and read them over and over again.   Pride and Prejudice is my favorite, but I love the silliness of Northanger Abbey, too.   Although not all the film adaptations are very good - the camera work in the 2007 BBC version of Persuasion kind of gave me the creeps - I'm always up for watching one.  

My love of British culture is not limited to Victorian novels, either.  I recently started watching the new show Sherlock on Netflix and can recommend it without reservation.

I have been to England.  I was there for six weeks back in the mid-90s.  The experience taught me several important things:

• There is not enough ice
• British food, by and large, is pretty awful
• Line-dried jeans are crunchy and not okay with me
• You have to be utterly mad to drive in England

That doesn't mean I'm not desperate to go back for another visit.  For one thing, I've heard the food has improved considerably.  For another, I need to make it up to Scotland this time.  Those accents are even better!

A day of Norman Rockwell & torture

As you know, yesterday I posted sweet pictures of my children and the childhood memories we shared over the breakfast table.  It was all very Norman Rockwell.  We ate scrambled eggs and homemade banana bread.

Then I spent the rest of the morning torturing Piper in Ravenswood, since the novel is suddenly no longer complete and I have to try to write a new climax and ending for it . . . again.

As I was telling my kids over lunch (yes, we talk a lot at meals), the way you make fictional characters do things is to torture them.  If you don't torture them, then they act a lot like real people do.  They read books and watch TV and surreptitiously pick their noses - none of which makes for great literature or even a fun read.

You know how when you read a good book you get to the end and kind of wake up and think, "Whoa!  Where am I?" because you've been so sucked into that world?  Well, the same thing happens when I'm writing, which means I really felt like I'd spent the morning, to some extent, torturing Piper in my selfish attempt to get a full-length novel out of her.  The poor girl took it all quite well, I must say.

The most heartbreaking thing about yesterday's efforts, for me, is that I again have all this first-draft stuff that will need several revisions before it rises above crap, let alone blends seamlessly into the rest of the novel.  For one thing, I managed to drop ninjas in there.  I've mentioned in my blog before that Meagan saved me during last year's NaNoWriMo by suggesting ninja pirates to me, thus freeing my novel Blue from a heroine who was content to wander in a blissful meadow all day (I wish I were kidding).  The ninja pirates were awesome, and I got a new favorite character, Sebastian, out of the deal.

However, I can't have ninjas in all my books.  If I ever do become a bestselling author or even (fingers-crossed) a respected one, I don't want someone writing their dissertation on the meaning of ninjas in Amy Moran's novels.  I want them instead to write about my use of food as a reflection of family dysfunction.  It's a consistent theme, and would make a great thesis.  

Childhood adventures

This morning at breakfast we were talking about our earliest memories.  The kids were completely unimpressed with mine.  I was standing next to a bed, and there was a baby on the bed.  That's it.  So, yeah, they were right to be unimpressed.  I think I'm only about two years old, though, based on the height of the bed and such.

Jacob's earliest memories are awesome.  He remembers sitting in a high chair obliterating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich while his dad played guitar a few feet away.  I was teasing him about his parents keeping him in a high chair until he was six, but he also remembers being handed off into his grandmother's arms, so I think Jacob wins for having the earliest memories.  My memories of being carried are all me begging and being told, "No, Amy, you're too big to pick up."  I was a rather sturdy child, but more on that later.

Mindy's earliest memories are from preschool, also at three or four years old.  She remembers having to take naps and being bored out of her mind.  She remembers playing quietly in the corner while the other kids learned words she already knew.  She also remembers having to remind the teacher that a universe is bigger than a galaxy.  Ah, nerd memories!

Isaac remembers his first night sleeping in a big bed instead of a toddler bed.  He was probably three or four years old.  He says he woke up when he rolled out and hit his head.  "There was some blood, but only a little bit."  I have no recollection of this at all, so here's yet more evidence of my lousy mothering skills.

Speaking of mothers not knowing what their kids are up to . . .

I've always been a fan of eating, and when I was a kid I sneaked a lot of food.  I'm assuming my mom is well aware of this since every bag of cookies always had just one left in it.  (I couldn't finish the whole bag.  Then people would KNOW.)

When I was eight years old I tried to make a cupcake.  I put a reduced amount of the ingredients from the Betty Crocker cookbook into a cupcake liner and mixed it up as best I could.  There was still a lot of egg yolk and such, but it's hard to mix well in a paper liner.  Then I stuck it into the microwave.  It didn't work well, and the smell was awful.  I threw away the "cupcake" in the garbage outside and sprayed the house liberally with Lysol, but when mom came home a few minutes later I had to 'fess up.

However, one time when I was home alone I decided I wanted to make donuts and pulled out the trusty Betty Crocker cookbook.  I managed to heat up a pan full of oil and make up some dough, but they didn't turn out right and the oil popped like crazy.  Somehow I managed to clean up all the evidence, or so I thought.  The next day my mom asked what the burns were from on my arms.  I, of course, feigned ignorance, so to this day she probably thinks one of my friends' parents was putting out cigarettes on my arms.  No, Mom, I'd just gotten marginally smarter since the cupcake incident.

I love it when a plan comes together

I mentioned in my blog post yesterday that I was considering deleting chapter seventeen of Ravenswood.  While reading through the novel again I get to that chapter and it is so boring and stupid that I can't even make myself read it, so pointless that I think I can delete it and have the rest of the book make perfect sense.  It's kind of like when you watch the deleted scenes on a DVD and think, "Well, duh.  Why did you shoot that scene in the first place?"

Unfortunately, if I remove that chapter then the novel, which was already on the short side, officially becomes a novella.  I don't want a novella.  I want a novel.

So I've been taking advantage of the insomnia due to oxycodone withdrawal (fun times!) to try to come up with some way to fill out the novel without just stuffing it full of rice like a cheap burrito.  I can't get around the fact that I'm going to have to make more happen.

Some of you have read a draft of the whole novel.  Although there have been lots of positive comments,  everyone has also made it clear that I do not end the novel well.  I improved it some, but it still leaves you hanging (sorry).  Some of you also know that I already started a sequel to Ravenswood.  It seemed like a priority since I ended the first one so unsatisfactorily.

This morning I came up with the solution to my dilemma, which suddenly seemed so obvious that I can't believe it took me this long.  I'm going to tighten the remaining chapters of the first book (except chapter seventeen which is going into the garbage because I never want to see it again) and continue into what I've written on the sequel, which is pretty exciting, if I do say so myself.  If I can get the conflict in the sequel to blend well into what was the end of the first novel, it will actually do a better job of completing the story arc.  I even have a spreadsheet of the major conflicts and their resolutions so I can check that I'm following each through every act of the novel.  (I am, after all, an accountant.  I know how to make things tie out.)

What's funny to me (and probably only to me) is that the original climax to the novel is currently in the middle, and now what was, to me, the new climax of the novel is going to be in the middle, as well.  This sucker just keeps growing.

What is less funny is that I now have another 25,000 to 30,000 words to write and a lot of reorganizing to do.  It's kind of like thinking you finished building the shed and deciding instead to make it the entry of a nice vacation cabin.

Another thing I've realized is that after Piper cuts her own bangs in chapter two that she really looks pretty emo.  This was unintentional, but now that she looks like that I can't get her to change back.  So annoying.

Incorporating the sequel is also going to bring in a guy who wears vintage clothes and skinny pants and probably a scarf.  Believe it or not, I really don't have anything to do with these decisions.

I'd better get back to writing.  I have a LOT of work to do.

It would be smarter not to write

When I was eight years old I wrote what was probably my first complete story.  My mom worked at my school, and in the afternoons I'd hang out in her room, waiting for a ride home.  Her room was full of fun things like two doves in a cage, lots of computers, and a binding machine.

I think it was the binding machine that really did it for me.  I wrote "Lindsey of Asia," cut pictures out of magazines to illustrate it, and bound it neatly.  I probably still have that thing in a box in the garage somewhere.

My mom was torn between delight and horror, since the incorrigible Miss Lindsey ended up in Asia when she ran away from home because her father (the president of the United States) was mean and neglectful.  I don't think I even gave my heroine a mother.  After reading it, my mom wondered where she'd gone wrong.

We had a poetry contest in third grade.  The theme was careers, and I wrote about being an inventor (more a mad scientist, really) and having my toes blown off.  I won the contest, and my teacher carefully copied the somewhat gruesome poem out in calligraphy.

I won more writing competitions over the years, including one for a short story in college, and one about ten years ago for compiling the worst paragraph possible.  Looking back, I think that awful paragraph I wrote was some of my best work.

Which brings me to my thought for the day: do I write simply because I was encouraged at a young age?  If I hadn't had that silly inventor poem copied into calligraphy, if I hadn't been stuck in a classroom for hours with a binding machine, if I hadn't been forced, like all children my age, to keep a journal in class, would I have this unfortunate writing addiction?

Yes, I do mean unfortunate.

Because writing sucks up time and attention.

Because writing reveals too much of what's inside my head (and even when it doesn't, my mother assumes it does).

Because writing exposes me to rejection and generous quantities of self-doubt.

This week I've been revising Ravenswood for the bazillionth time, and it rips me apart.  On one hand, I love the thing.  I get sucked into that world and want to stay and wander around.  On the other hand, there are parts of it I hate. For instance, some of the characters are flat as flounders (I despise them), and I think I might need to delete chapter 17 entirely.

I doubt there will ever be a point at which I can say, "I'm done.  This is my best work."

Which is why on days like this I think it would be smarter not to write.

Making Compromises

Mindy is upstairs weeping right now, and it's my fault.

Today is the Bible Challenge.  This is Isaac's second year competing, and it's his first year having put any real effort into preparing for it. I know he's going to do a wonderful job, and I really, really want to be there to see it.  However, I am kidding myself if I think my body can handle not only an hour round-trip in the car to get there, but hours of waiting while the competition is going on.  I'm hoping to take my last oxycodone this weekend, not start popping them every three hours again.

So I came up with a compromise.  Isaac will hitch a ride with his cousin, then we'll go this afternoon to watch the individual competition and see the awards ceremony.  What a great solution, right?  It'll still be rough on my body, but hopefully not too much to handle.  It's also better for Jacob, who has several commitments all afternoon and evening.

But Mindy is heartbroken.  She wants to go and hang out with the older kids like she did last year.  She wants to watch all the games and questions and pretend she's a part of it.

I made my daughter cry, just like I've had to so many other times.  They should tell you that before you have kids.  They should say, "You're about to have a little person that looks exactly like you.  You will love them in a way you've never imagined, and you are going to have to disappoint them and watch them cry, knowing it's your fault."

It is in this mood I share with you a link to a song off of Brandi Carlile's new album Bear Creek (via Paste Magazine).  The song is "That Wasn't Me," and it's beautiful and heart-wrenching, like most of her music.

Maybe that's what I can tell Mindy: when I make you cry, that wasn't me.

It's going to be okay, anyway.  I can hear her giggling in her room upstairs with her dad.