The Big DumpTruck

Throwing Little Thought Pebbles at Your Windshield Since 1996

Tag: writing

Coming Clean

I need to get something off my chest. It’s been bothering me for decades now, and that’s not good. But I have decided coming clean will free me up to be guilty about other aspects of my life.

I have a degree in English. It’s actually an English Lit degree with a minor in writing, based on what I studied. Sounds impressive, huh? I wanted a degree in creative writing, but couldn’t afford any of the colleges that offered that degree. Specifically Emerson. Oh how I wanted to go to Emerson.

So I spent four years at a private Catholic college deep in the heart of Connecticut, studying prose and poetry. I have the paperwork that proves I did.

However, I know nothing about literature. I know what I like to read, but I don’t know why I like it. I don’t know anything. I can’t believe I faked my way through college like that. I couldn’t tell you why the Great Novels are great. I don’t even like most of Shakespeare. I suck at English Lit.

Because I have this degree and I feel like certain things are expected of me, especially when I write. That’s the part that throws me into a panic. I keep thinking that having this degree should make me a better writer, but I don’t think it does. I fear it doesn’t. I don’t even like to talk with people who are actually good at this stuff because it’s so intimidating to me. How did I get through four years of college learning to analyze literature and not like good literature? I don’t even have drugs to blame this on, as I am clean as a whistle. I mean, I’m betting the Pope has smoked more pot than I have (which is none).

So the funny thing about this is that I used to write a lot of poetry. I edited my college’s literary magazine my junior and senior years. And get this! I have actually had a poetry reading (with a professor of mine and a friend of his) in a real live bookstore in Hartford. My parents even drove down for that one, which was fun because it was an “alternative lifestyle” bookstore run by some ex-nuns. This was 1987 or so, and I think my parents were shell-shocked, but maybe not.

So even as I’m being asked to participate in a public reading of my poetry, I’m convinced it’s absolute shit, because I cannot tell if it is or not. I like what I’ve written, but I like a lot of things that aren’t good. I enjoy crappy romance novels like there is no tomorrow. I find slogging through most of Dickens a chore (I enjoy the movie versions, though). I have no idea if my poetry is any good, and I’m afraid to find out. One of the other poets had written stuff that sounded completely alien to me. Where his poems good? I have no freaking idea. I didn’t think so, but I think he’d had books published, and I was selling computers, so who was I to judge with my unjustly-earned lit degree?

15 years ago, I actually had my own e-zine called “Block Lines”. Remember those? I was so cool. I published poetry I liked (and some of my own, but other people’s poetry as well.) I don’t know if I was a good editor (I didn’t really edit, I just selected what to publish) but it seemed like a hip, happening way to get some of my work out there. I had a lot of fun with it until I got pregnant and exhausted and put it on hiatus. For 15 years.

Every year as my birthday gets closer, I get a burst of inspiration to write, and this year, for the first time in a decade, I’ve been writing poetry again. I’m not going to share it here because I’m still too terrified that it’s crap. Well, I’m not terrified that it’s crap, I’m terrified that YOU will find out it’s crap.

So that’s what I wanted to come clean about. I’m a possibly crappy writer who can’t use the skills her degree should have given her to validate one way or the other the quality of her writing. There. I’ll start to feel better any minute now.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go write a crappy poem about how this makes me feel.

1 Comment by on January 20, 2012
filed in complaint department, writing
tagged , ,

Useless Writing Advice

I do not have the ability to give advice on being a better writer. I have the ability to give advice on just about anything and everything else, including how to choose a tomato (no skin flaws and it should smell like a tomato), but being  better writer? Well, I suppose I could try, if that’s what you’d like.

Expensive Equipment Helps Create Better Prose

I think this is a gimme. You need the most expensive writing equipment you can find. Take out loans. You need top of the line everything. There’s a pen for sale at the local mall for $10,000. You need that pen. Everything you write with that Bic you stole from a waitress is pure crap. Gerbils can’t even be bothered to shred the paper you write on with your less-than-10k pen. You’ll also need a top of the line Mac laptop, iPad and an iPhone 4. As for the latter, if it isn’t white, you should go turn in your MFA.

Live in a Home with a Real Working Fireplace

If you can’t simulate the working conditions of Charles Dickens or Emily Bronte, what hope do you have of ever convincing a soul that your writing is even passable? You need the sound of a crackling fire as background noise. You need to poke at the embers when you’re having a hard time trying to come up with a new way to describe the angst of the twenty-something. You should just stop writing and call a Realtor. Now.

Burn Candles that Smell Like Lemons

This is a controversial one. I know there are people who would argue with me on this, but you’ve come to me for useless writing advice, so you had best listen to me. Get some lemon-scented candles. You see, what these will do is to trigger strong memories of your mother/aunt/grandmother with the Lemon Pledge obsession and you will get some great material out of remember how much you hated that your mother/aunt/grandmother couldn’t cook/clean/express love. It’s great stuff!

Buy New Camera Equipment

I don’t know that it will really help your writing, but I’m trying to justify a few purchases I’ve made in the past year, so just indulge me, would you?

Get a Metric Ton of Sleep. Nap Like You Mean It.

I can’t say enough about naps and sleeping. I bought flannel sheets and I could live in my bed for the rest of my life. I could be Grandma Georgina, and we would start to wonder again how the four elderly people who never left the bed went to the bathroom after eating cabbage soup 3 meals a day. I promise not to eat cabbage, but I still will probably need to go to the bathroom. Some things can’t be helped.

I think this will help you write better. I won’t know, because I’ll be too busy sleeping to read your book.

2 Comments by on January 17, 2011
filed in humor, lists
tagged ,

The Secret to Attracting Spammers

I have been on the Internet for about 16 years now. The Internet as we define it today. Prior to that, I ran a BBS out of my bedroom on a dedicated phone line. One person could be logged in at a time. It was great fun, but can you even imagine if the Internet could only support one user at a time? I’d be so annoyed at the busy signals!

Since moving to WordPress (when Blogger inexplicably kicked anyone with their own domain and server space to the curb – Ev wouldn’t have let this happen back when he owned the company. Back then, I even paid extra for my level of membership, because I thought it was worth it. But I seriously digress.) I haven’t had much trouble with spammers. I actually haven’t had many comments at all. Or readers. I think that might be my fault, for neglecting the site while I went crazy playing with Twitter. Banging out 140 characters is easy. Writing longer pieces takes more work, and who on earth wants to have to put effort into anything these days? Hell, I just watched an episode of Victorious on Nick because it was set to record on the DVR and the TV changed channels and I was too lazy to get up to find the remote. That would be work.

And then, Loyal Reader Angie pointed out in an email that my comment functionality was turned off. That happened during an upgrade, I swear. So I think I fixed it. Well, I know I did, because I’ve gotten hammered (for me, anyway) with spammy comments on one single item on the blog. Not across all articles, just on the one. You don’t see them because I set all comments to be approved by me until you’ve previously had one approved. The post in question was about a little Mexican girl who hangs out with a monkey and a backpack. I won’t mention her name because I don’t want to have the spammers attack this post. Of course, they could have picked the word monkey as a trigger and now this one will be a problem too. We’ll see.

So in conclusion, if you want spammers, write about Ora-day. She’s popular.

No Comments by on January 16, 2011
filed in complaint department, humor
tagged , ,

NaNoWriMo 2009

7000 words in, I finally have a plot. Or at least a purpose. And characters. The full plot will probably not reveal itself until the end of the month, meaning I’ll have a lot more work to do to get it into a finished state. Which, based on history, I will never do. I’m writing about my kid, his friend, and his cousins. It is fiction, I swear. My niece does not own a store that only sells cups and saucers. She’s 9 – owning a store like that is years in her future.

I don’t know why I keep doing NaNoWriMo, but I’m at the point where I almost have to do it, or I’ll feel bad about it. So I give up a few hours of my November, no big deal, right?

So while I’m working on this, please send snacks.

1 Comment by on November 7, 2009
filed in writing
tagged ,

Testing the Keyboard Prior to Coffee

Yup, it appears to work. Strange, because normally I require some sort of caffeinated beverage to be able to string together letters into words. But no, this is working and I have not yet had my coffee. It could all fall apart any minute, though, so I’m going to end this test and grind up some beans.

No Comments by on August 2, 2009
filed in Uncategorized
tagged

One Word at a Time

I have been lax in my writing. I will blame this on something external to myself, as usual. Today, I will blame being lax on a lack of high quality snack foods in my home. I will blame the lack of high quality snack foods on the fact that I detest grocery shopping and haven’t gone in a while. I will blame the lack of grocery shopping on getting paid only once a month. I will blame getting paid once a month on my employer. So the fact that I haven’t been writing is clearly the fault of The Man.

Based on a phone call I had with [Nameless Person] I am going to try to do better. I know that I can claim to be a “professional” author because of the thyroid-specific articles I have written for Thyroid-Info.com. But what happened to my excitement over the “new” book project that had me out registering domain names in the middle of the night? Lost that energy. So I was rethinking that book and I think I can tweak my approach slightly and still make it work. So I’m going to promise myself and everyone that I will have at least 500 words written by the end of the day Friday. And a minimum of another thousand by the end of the weekend. Of course, by writing that I will find 50 other things that just NEED to get done.

I have to wash my bedspread, for instance. It is covered with dog nose prints. I do not want to sleep with something that smells like a dog. (He probably doesn’t want it to smell like a human, but I have opposable thumbs so I win.) I don’t think it will fit in my washing machine, so I’ll have to actually leave the house to get this thing cleaned. Do you know how much work it’s going to be to get my ass to a laundromat? People, please! I’m only human.

Okay, off to find more coffee. These words aren’t just going to write themselves.

No Comments by on July 21, 2009
filed in Uncategorized
tagged ,

Merchandise To Be For Sale

I had a huge brainstorm today. I was trying to write tweets that would make it onto this new website http://tweetingtoohard.com and I came up with one that I loved so much I thought it would look really good on things for sale. So I put it up on the website as a tagline, threw a copyright line down on the bottom of the page, and now I’ll get to work designing the product. I think This is going to be the title of the book I’m writing. So consider this my claim. Timestamped (checks watch, 4:53pm) today, May 21st.

Because you are all fans of my fabulous unwritten book, I hope you will buy all the swag that I will have for sale shortly.

In the meantime, don’t tell anyone about my new fabulous title in case someone writes faster than I do.

by on May 21, 2009
filed in Uncategorized
tagged

Today’s Book Titles

Here is today’s list. You can’t have the first one, that one is mine.

The Adventures of Keychain and Neil
40 Ways to Prepare Cold Cereal
The Rat in the Hat
Helmet Hair: Spending Too Much Time Playing Halo
Even More Ways to Prepare Cold Cereal

p.s. I think I successfully removed the snippet of code that was automatically adding links to key words in the blog to Amazon products. Some of the links were too odd. So from now on, if there’s a link to an Amazon Product in an entry, I added it there myself.

by on April 9, 2008
filed in humor, lists, writing
tagged , ,

What’s that Smell?

I am odd. Or maybe not. Or maybe I’m odd for reasons entirely unrelated to what I am writing about today. I’ll leave that discussion for others to have.

As you all know, I’m a writer. I write. I don’t claim to be a Writer (capital W) like some heavily paid novelist. But from age 24 to about age 41, I was a professional technical writer. Got paid to show up every day and put words into a computer. People all over the world read those words – some of them, to not be hurt or killed on the job. Others, to figure out how to get started with their new laptop computers. It’s not glamorous work, but it pays well.

I’ve also written freelance stuff for a newspaper that no longer exists, and I consider myself some kind of humorist, at least at times, with this 11+ year old website. It isn’t a paying gig, but I like it. (Don’t you think I’d be writing more often if it were paying? I do.)

So with that background in mind, I can tell you that over the years, I have purchased probably every kind of notebook ever made. I’m kind of an addict. And the ones I like the best are the ones with thin-ish paper that makes a rustling kind of noise after you’ve written on it. Not exactly like the old air mail paper (does anyone but me remember that? It was super-thin so that it wouldn’t weigh down the envelope and cost more to mail) but not far off. I like thin paper.

So I got a new notebook out of the supply closet at work when I started a new project (because the notebook I’d bought at Staples was really nice, except for the thick paper). I love it. Perfect paper thickness. The ink from my fountain pen doesn’t bleed all over the place.

It smells like it came from my grandmother’s barn. (She didn’t own the barn, she rented an apartment in a multi-family house that happened to have a big (HUGE) barn behind it.) The house no longer exists as it did when she lived there, and the barn is long gone. But when I was about 10 I went in there with older boy cousins I had never met before (because they lived in Mississippi and had come up for my grandfather’s funeral) because you cannot keep a teenage boy out of a giant old mysterious barn. We found some glorious old stuff – in one workroom the calendar on the wall was literally from the 1950s. It was as if the owner had turned off the lights one night and had just never gone back in. To be honest, I’m surprised none of us fell through a floor or needed a tetanus shot after that experience. Knowing me, I probably spent the entire time saying “We shouldn’t be in here! This is dangerous!” whether it was or not.

Anyway, the one thing I still remember from that day (other than the funeral) was the smell. An old abandoned barn can really get quite a stink up. God knows anyone with a dust, mold or mildew allergy would have had to be hospitalized.

My new notebook with the perfect paper smells like it was stored in that barn. I’m so incredibly torn – I want to keep using it, but it stinks! I guess I’ll just keep using it until I can’t stand it any more. Or until I notice people wrinkling their noses when I walk into a meeting. Darn you, notebook supply company! Why did you do this to me?

by on April 8, 2008
filed in writing
tagged , , ,

Stop Putting Songs in My Head!

Email friends of mine have successfully put the song “Brand New Key” into my head. It’s been there for two days. Stop it! Stop it!

I came up with a book title yesterday. I don’t have a book to go with it, but I’m giving the book title away for free. If you use it, be sure to at least send me a free copy of the book. And then I’ll pull a Wright on you and go on some anti-American rant and people will stand on your front lawn and yell things about you because you took my suggestion for the name of your book. HA! I will PWN you!

Here is the title:

English as a 10th Language

Okay, so go get writing. I’ll be sitting here thinking up titles. I’m working on one right now, the draft version is “English as an 11th Language.” Too clichéd?

by on March 29, 2008
filed in writing
tagged
« Older Posts