bushcast / storytelling — View Comments
2
Sep 10

Bushcast Episode 3: Julie Learns How To Survive In Prison

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In this episode of the Bushcast, I recount the time (a few weeks ago) I spent 26 hours at the ER at LAC/USC hospital.

It was amazing how quickly I switched over to prison mentality. It was almost immediate. Helped by a cop threatening to send me to jail on my way there.

It was also amazing how long it took me to tell this story — I cut the video down from 30 minutes to 15. Yeah. I know. I still cut some funny stuff, including me doing a Mickey Rooney in Breakfast At Tiffany’s style impression of the Chinese man who processed my paperwork.

So sorry it’s taken me so long to put up the next episode — I actually recorded this a while ago, and it’s just taken me a while to edit it. I’ve been busy, which is good, but it just means I’m not quite as on top of everything as I’d like to be.

Thanks for watching guys. And — I want you to know you mean a lot to me. Whenever I hear from y’all, I’m really bolstered and touched. X Julie

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novels / publishing / women — View Comments
23
Aug 10

Why The Publishing Industry Can Suck My Dick

I decided a year ago that I no longer want to publish books through the traditional publishing industry — even though that was my singular dream since I was nine years old.

The publishing industry is dead. Between ebooks overtaking print sales and chain stores dictating what gets published, the business is finished.

It’s inefficient, outdated, bloated, corrupt, and it has willfully buried its head in the sand all these years, to the devastation of writers’ careers and literature. It deserves to die.

The publishing industry is racist, sexist, and it heavily favors white male authors over others, especially in literary fiction, which produces the next generation of American literature. If women and non-whites can’t get published and can’t get reviewed and can’t get on prize lists, we will not be able to contribute. For that reason alone it deserves to die.

Meanwhile, the rise of internet technology has brought authors closer to our audiences and given us the chance to give ourselves careers. No longer can an elite group of racist, sexist anachronisms shut the door to the rest of us. Any of us can make literature. The gatekeepers that kept so many of us out are failing because prejudice always fails — how can a business that limits the chances of large groups of people possibly succeed? Greatness always surges through.

I’ve been working on a new novel project that I’m very excited about and that will involve interaction and participation with readers. I’m not ready to publicize the project yet. However, Seth Godin’s announcement that he’s leaving traditional publishing behind is huge, and since I’ve already decided to do the same I decided I should say so.

With a huge bestselling author like Godin going, the world will follow.

I have no sympathy for big publishing. They had their chance, and thousands of young novelists like me had their careers thwarted or redirected because of their incompetence. I am very happy to have the T.V. and screenwriting career I have today, which I wouldn’t have had were it not for the inadequacy of the publishing industry. But now the way I feel about it is — they don’t fucking get to publish my novels. I will publish them myself. Because I’m better at marketing myself than they are. I’d rather sell electronic versions than print versions (which return very small margins on costs). And I will pocket every single fucking cent.

And the publishing industry can suck my dick.

*********************************

I just spent an hour searching the internet for statistics about the racism and sexism in the publishing industry. Couldn’t find any — I know I’ve read some before, so if anyone can send some, please do. However, anyone working in this business knows about it already. Here are a few pieces I did come across:

http://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2010/08/all-the-sad-young-literary-women/61821/

http://www.thefrisky.com/post/246-jodi-picoult-accuses-book-reviews-of-favoring-white-male-literary-darli/

http://amyking.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/why-weren%E2%80%99t-any-women-invited-to-publishers-weekly%E2%80%99s-weenie-roast/

http://www.complete-review.com/quarterly/vol3/issue4/sexist.htm

*****************************************

And these statistics excerpted from an article by T. K. Kenyon (see link below):

Percentage of book reviews for male authors vs. female authors for 2006 in major review publications: 56%:44%

Percentage of book reviews for male authors vs. female authors for Jan-June 2007 in major review publications: 63%:37%

Percentage of book reviews for male authors vs. female authors for at the New York Times Review of Books (very influential): 72%:28%

Ratio of male book reviewers to female reviewers at the New York Times Review of Books: 2:1

Percentage of articles written by men to those written by women in the five “thought leader” magazines: 3:1

Percentage of male book buyers to female: 45%:55%

Women constitute only 17 percent of opinion writers at The New York Times, 10 percent at The Washington Post, 28 percent at U.S. News & World Report, 23 percent at Newsweek and 13 percent at Time. Overall, only 24 percent of nationally syndicated columnists are women.

From: http://www.bloggernews.net/112350

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T.V. writing / advice / novels / screenwriting / storytelling — View Comments
16
Aug 10

What You Need To Know About Cliche

One of my creative writing professors in college — Joyce Carol Oates — used to draw lines through words, sentences and entire paragraphs of our stories and write above the rejected pieces: “cliche”.

This was very painful.

We wanted nothing more than to please her — we admired her.

I admired her. I wanted her to like me and approve of me and say I was a good writer.

So when she wrote “cliche” on my stories, I found it upsetting.

She told us “a cliche is anything  you’ve ever heard before.”

This definition seemed too harsh, too limiting to us. We protested. Wouldn’t there come a point where you were just writing stuff you hadn’t heard before, to avoid cliche?

Indeed, she told us a reviewer once wrote of her that she writes as if to avoid cliche. Still, we had no excuse to lapse into lazy habits.

Joyce was brisk, fresh, controlled, and she expected the same of us.

I often walked home from her class stirred up. I was either elated because she had praised my work, told me I was a good writer, or despondent because she had marked it all through, dismissed it.

But the power of seeing her strike through those words with her pen — that awful little word cliche that made me feel like I was lazy, average, common — that feeling stayed with me.

Now I’m on high alert for it. I wince when I find it in my own work. Other people have told me I’m too harsh in pointing it out everywhere. But that’s how we get better –

Because it’s an easy test. If I or you or anyone has ever heard or read or seen it before, it’s a cliche. And it doesn’t have to be painful — getting better is liberating. It might tweak your ego a little in the moment, but that’s good. Notching your ego and making your art better makes you bigger, not smaller.

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emotion / storytelling — View Comments
8
Aug 10

Daddy

This was the last time I spoke to my father.

For the longest time, I called him Daddy — like a Southerner, like a child. Not consciously.

I didn’t speak to him for almost a year — until two weeks ago –

I was at home rehearsing my essay for the NPR show State of the Reunion. The producers were coming over to record the piece. I’ve never done radio before, so I was nervous. I’ve been busy, so I didn’t have a lot of time to write it — between anxiety over how to perform it and anxiety over what I had written (are these jokes as sharp as they could be, do they make me seem like a bitch, is it too revealing, could the whole thing be tighter, funnier, more cohesive ….) I was feeling nervous. But also excited — NPR! That’s pretty fucking cool.

Then I got a text from my real dad (I call him my real dad to distinguish him from my stepdad, who was there for me growing up and whom I adore) — whining about how he didn’t know what he did but didn’t I think I had made my point –

Then the NPR producers arrived.

I had to record my essay — which I was already nervous about — with this aching, anxious knot in my stomach in the shape of my father.

The recording went ok — not perfect, but it was fine. I spent the rest of the day dreading the confrontation I knew had to happen. I couldn’t let him just keep interrupting my life like that — it’s like he has a radar for when I’m starting to break free of him, so he can swoop in and suck me back into the tar that is his emotional mess.

I called him. Everything in me didn’t want to. Everything in me has resisted writing this post since this happened almost two weeks ago — but I don’t feel like it would be fair to this blog to write about deciding not to speak to him last year and then not write about speaking to him again. It would feel dishonest.

He was at a restaurant. I told him if this was a bad time, we could talk later. He said no, now that he’s gotten me he wanted to do it then. He stepped outside.

He started — he went off on how he didn’t know what he did but didn’t I think it was wrong to go so long without speaking to your own father, hadn’t I made my point, what point was I trying to make anyway? Hadn’t he been punished enough? That kind of thing. I let him talk.

Then I talked:

Your not loving me — your abandoning me over and over and over again — your compulsive selfishness — has left me unable to connect with anyone.

I said this between sobs — I was crying so hard I almost vomited –

I struggle — hard — with depression — because of you, because of what you did —

I can’t have relationships. I try and fail — I can barely even have friendships — this started with you –

I can’t afford to have you in my life. The last time we talked, I was calling to tell you I was going to withdraw my 401k, which was my only security in the world — and I really didn’t want to do that. And it was only $9,000 — $6,000 after taxes. I was hoping you would say “don’t do that. I’ll give you the money” which you could have easily done. Instead you gave me this awful speech about you didn’t know why I thought I would ever succeed as a writer — how long would it take before I gave up — how long have I been out here and when would I wake up and realize it wasn’t going to happen and come home — what was it going to take to make me wake up to the wrongness of my choices —

That was already a low, terrible moment for me — and you took it as the chance to kick me while I was down — and while you’ve done that before, in other areas of my life, it was the fact that it was about my career, the most important thing to me, that finally made me realize that I couldn’t afford to let you do that to me anymore. The biggest part of what I do is maintaining the emotional energy and momentum and courage to keep moving forward no matter what, and I cannot afford to have my own father planting doubt in my head —

But the worst part is — you already succeeded. You planted the doubt about who I am, as a person. When I was a child. You changed who I am, as a human being. I can’t separate who I am out from what you did. You warped what I became. I’ve tried, hard — and I continue trying, because I have a lot of hope and faith — but I keep running into the road block that is you.

I went on. But that was the gist of what I said.

He responded — you are 100% right and I am 100% wrong. I was very bitter and very selfish, and you suffered for it. I regret what I did. It’s not that I didn’t love you — I didn’t love you the right way.

He said more, but that was the gist of what he said. You might think that sounds like progress. But my father is a person who says whatever he thinks the other person wants to hear, and he never means any of it. He loves drama, which is why I think he loved to hear me violently sobbing and having this huge confrontation — it satisfied that craving in him. Unable to feel real emotions, he thinks these dramatic upsets means he’s interacting emotionally. He mirrors the people he’s with — so he basically just mirrored back to me what I was saying, in a very dramatic and insincere way. I have enough experience dealing with this man to know not to believe any of it.

I told him I wasn’t sure I could let him back into my life. But that one thing I was sure of — he was absolutely not allowed to criticize me ever again.

He asked if I was prepared to make the same promise — if I was prepared not to criticize him anymore. Caught off guard, I agreed –

Now that I’ve had time to think about it, I realize how absurd this is. Routinely in our interactions, he’s pointed out that he has forgiven me, so I should forgive him. I have done nothing to injure him — he has nothing to forgive me for. He injured me, greatly. For someone to commit evil and then to say that you can’t criticize him for it is just so twisted. I’m not going to hold that promise.

Eventually he said he needed to go back to his dinner but he felt a lot better about having talked to me — he just wanted to hear my voice. I hung up leaving things ambiguous about whether we would talk again.

Then I cried, a lot.

I had plans to see Inception with my friend S that night. I cried during Inception, during the father moments.

At the bar at the Arclight, I told S what had happened. I told her “he said ‘it’s not that I didn’t love you — I didn’t love you the right way.’” And I started sobbing — surrounded by strangers at the Arclight bar. S asked the bartender for napkins, and the woman looked embarrassed for me and said she didn’t have any.

S was kind and supported me. I went home and cried more, cried these last two weeks. Cried every time I’ve tried to write this post.

A few days ago I got a letter from my dad saying that he would stay out of my life and that I could solve all my problems if I accepted Jesus as my savior. He never used to be a religious man — until he took up with his 29-year-old Brazilian evangelist maid, who’s now his fiancee. My dad is impressionable, influenced by the people he’s surrounded by, whether they be crooks or evangelists.

Even if my dad does stay out of my life, which is doubtful, he’s in it at the cellular level. I’m having a very difficult time separating who I am from him and how I feel about myself because of him. I don’t know that I’ll ever be free of him. But I’m trying. Hard.

Continue reading →

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bushcast / storytelling — View Comments
19
Jul 10

Bushcast Episode 2: Where You Go When You’ve Been Abducted

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Podcast (bushcast-audio): Play in new window | Download

Second episode of the Bushcast y’all. I tell the story of the time my first boyfriend and I got lost in the Southern Appalachians near my hometown — and found this group of two men and a bunch of young boys living in a clearing in the middle of the National Forest.

This one’s slower and more contemplative — partly because of the subject matter and partly because I got a migraine halfway through, which you can see in a very creepy way by noticing that my left iris and pupil dilates bigger than the right one. My face also gets puffy and a little red — as the pain presses around my left eye. My trigger is emotional stress. This story must have triggered me.

Not all the episodes will be this slow. I don’t think I even realized how slow I was talking until I went back to watch it — and then saw my eye and my puffy face. You’re getting a little slice of life, people.

So this is the story of a time I got lost — and got haunted — and found my way home by heading down.

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14
Jul 10

World-Building From The Inside Out

Your story’s world is a reflection — a result — of what’s happening inside your characters.

The world doesn’t create the character. The character creates the world around her. You create the world around you.

Like a prism refracting colors or a digital projector — the image starts with the emotional footprint inside your main characters. You project this inner image outside them. That becomes their world.

Here’s how it works: I believe I can be successful, that I deserve success — so I act in ways that confirm that belief. I filter what I see for stories that confirm that belief and fail to see those that don’t. I set up my world in ways that support this belief. I gradually adhere to a system of rules that affirm this belief. Rules like if you don’t hold on to what you’ve got, it may be taken away from you and you don’t deserve success, you earn it. These rules build out and become my world. I don’t even recognize parts of the world that don’t agree. I know I’m in Julie-world because Julie-world is defined by these rules — rules that started inside me and served me at one time, and then, because I gave them power-of-attorney over my life, grew strong like a sentient computer program and jumped outside my head and started governing the world around me. Now, not only do I walk around following these rules in my head — but I insist on seeing the world as if this is how the world operates too. Because Julie-world starts inside me and is projected, reflected out. Julie-world is something I inflict on the world.

Many storytellers will start world-building by asking themselves tons of questions — how does this place work? what are the physical laws, political laws, cultural rules of this period — what does this place look like? –

Start by asking how these characters work — what are their internal physical laws, political laws, cultural rules — these answers will tell you what this place looks like. If your characters are haunted by past lives they can’t shake, their environs will be haunted. They may even have established an elaborate system of rules, laws, customs, moral strictures disallowing the past from sticking around — this started inside them. If your characters are liars, they will inhabit a world of false fronts. If your characters love, they inhabit a world that loves.

Worlds aren’t built top-down (what galaxy is this?), bottom-up (what does a wedding ring look like?) — worlds are built inside out. What don’t you know about yourself, that we can see all around you? What rules are you following unconsciously? These rules limn your world.

You build their world by establishing the rules that govern them.

The world IS the rules. And the rules are a by-product of the emotional life of your main characters — a structure organizing their hopes and fears. Because deep down they think that by following these rules they’ll get what they want.

Worlds are anchored, buoyed inside our main characters’ guts. The more the characters’ guts direct their outer world, the more we feel the piece. The bigger emotional impact. Bigger experience. The more we feel like we live in this world. These are people in our world.

A given character could walk into my house and her world would still be different from my world. Because her world isn’t bound by geography, it’s bound by the rules she feels she’s bound by. They feel they’re bound by.

The world is symptoms helping us diagnose what’s going on inside the character. Eczema doesn’t just exist and then a person finds himself inside it: he produces it. We see the skin rash, and that’s how we know what’s going on inside him. This strange place exists because they do, because they are the way they are and their world can’t be any other way. When they change, their world changes. Often, that’s how we know a character has changed — we see their world change.

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7
Jul 10

Bushcast Ep. 1: The Worst Thing That Can Happen In A Movie Theatre

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Podcast (bushcast-audio): Play in new window | Download

Ok gang, I need you to bear with me. This is the first video I’ve ever made (I know, right?). First time I’ve ever edited. My virgin run, if you will.

But I was waiting for something juicy to start the Bushcast with, and tonight a certain anonymous perv gave me my first episode.

I’m warning you — if you have a job, or responsibilities, or you’re not immortal — please do not waste precious seconds of your life on this experiment in giggling and discursive self-indulgence. It’s 5 minutes 26 seconds long, and the last bit turns … experimental. Partly by design and partly because I don’t know how to edit and I messed up.

Also, I recorded this at 2:00 a.m. because it took me two hours just to figure out how to record stuff on my computer. Yeah. The full story was 17 minutes long so just be grateful I figured out enough iMovie to whittle it down to 5 minutes. Astonishing, right? That I could stretch that into 17 minutes.

Enough caveats. I bring you BushCast Episode 1: The Worst Thing That Can Happen In A Movie Theatre.

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emotion — View Comments
3
Jul 10

Men

On the bottom of my Writers Guild application, it said “Other Interests or Specialized Knowledge.” I put — “Men.”

This is gonna be one of those posts that I feel like I shouldn’t write. Which is what tells me I should. I’m a novelist. I push myself further, always. I go — there. I search the edges of my peripheral vision — what am I ignoring? What don’t I want to see? What am I blind to? This is my subject.

Men are my subject.

The subject of my life.

As much as I go on about women, about feminism, what’s important to us — I talk about women. I think about men.

What allows me to think this much about men is the disconnect I feel with most people. If I were connected to them, I wouldn’t have the mental energy to think about them so much.

I try stuff out — this is what keeps me flexible. I give myself permission to try stuff. To embarrass myself, to be wrong. To feel shame.

I started this post weeks ago.

I think about sex all day long.

But I’ve been burned, like a child on a hot stove. I think about it obsessively because I’m afraid of having it.

I live on an island. Men live on another island, where I can see them and long for them and never ever reach them.

I think of the relationships I’ve had. What they all had in common — distance. Even when I was with them, I could never reach them. They were estranged from me in every way –

These men spoke to me because they had what I craved — distance. The illusion of a relationship without the terror of closeness.

The only way I know how to be with a man is when he’s abandoning me. If he’s already leaving me, before I’ve even met him, that’s when I know I’m home.

I make eyes all day long. With men. I make eyes and think about sucking their dicks, think about the worst things — and then

I’m not interested in married guys or guys in relationships — they have to be near yet far. They have to seem like I can have them, like there is no impossible gulf between us. Attraction isn’t something you think about — it’s something you feel. I learned this game early.

Do they know, when we’re trading eyefucks, how little this has to do with them and how much it has to do with my life? Do they know this is my life — that I was robbed, and now I spend my days making eyes at strangers instead of being loved?

I want to be loved, and I don’t know how.

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drama / emotion / storytelling — View Comments
3
Jun 10

I Don’t Remember Who ‘We’ Were

Freshman year at Princeton, we were going to New York a lot because it was just an hour by train, and because the little shuttle train called the Dinky dropped off about a block through the Junior Slums from our dorm room, it was literally an hour and a half door-to-door, Witherspoon Hall to Penn Station.

I don’t remember who ‘we’ were.

Could have been a few different people on that trip — we were there for different reasons. I was probably doing something impossibly glamorous like visiting a real New York artist’s studio. Somehow we wound up catching different trains home.

Was I supposed to meet them under that sign with the spinning destinations? Was I late and that’s why I was alone in Penn Station in the middle of the night?

I think I had my book bag, like an anchor.

I was 18 and new to New York. I was afraid I would be robbed the minute I dropped my guard — maybe I was already being robbed, pickpocketed, or would, and not even know it. That is the bag I packed with me to New York that night.

All Princeton kids carry book-bags around at all times — jammed full to prove we were working or about to work or capable of working or at least thinking about working all the time. Our work was to think. We thought about big, important stuff. That was our jobs. Your book-bag was your guard against recriminations of the world — you’re not working hard enough. Not enough thoughts.

I didn’t want them to take it from me. I guarded it.

The next train to Princeton wasn’t for another hour.

I made my way into the urine-soaked, fluorescent bathroom. Metal ant-theft purse clasps. Signs warning you to watch your belongings. The scattered contents of a woman’s purse on the floor.

I tried the first stall. Blood all over the toilet steal and broken crack vials scattered on the floor. Pushed open the second door on a shrieking transexual clown. Ran for the handicapped stall — chased by the clown. Slammed the door on his hand as he tried to force it open. Locked the door and backed away from it, terrified. But I still had to pee like a racehorse. Dropped my stuff down, pulled down my pants and squatted over the filthy toilet seat –

A crack vial rolled from beneath the other stall and hit my foot –

The clown shrieked and stretched his hand after it, groping — touching my foot –

Then he squeezed his head and shoulders underneath the partition, going after the crack, smiling up at my naked cunt –

I kicked him and screamed –

I yanked up my pants and pressed myself against the wall. The clown stood on the toilet in the next stall and looked down over the partition, screaming at me to give him his medicine back –

I kicked his crack back over to his stall. I couldn’t hear what he was doing in there. I was afraid he was going to attack me the minute I opened my stall door. I didn’t know whether he had left or not. I waited an interminable amount of time, then I busted the door open and ran out of the bathroom all the way across the length of Penn Station to the retail safety of the magazine shop. Shaking, I flipped through magazines without seeing them. I looked over my shoulder — I thought the clown might still be chasing me. Maybe this was one of those movies where the end-game is destroying the clown by blowing up Penn Station. I flipped through magazines without seeing them for the hour till my train to Princeton. I felt guilty and dumb for being in Penn Station alone in the middle of the night. Was I brazen or a hayseed? I was new to New York. I probably didn’t tell my friends.

I shook all the way till I got on the train, maybe till my dorm room bed. I didn’t want to be robbed. I was 18.

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26
May 10

You Know More Than You Know

When I was a teenager, I went with my parents to visit the beautiful new farmhouse of some of their friends. The property was idyllic — on a creek, in a valley, with cleared, fenced horse pastures, horses, a large finished barn a little ways from the Victorian house.  The couple had been together for almost twenty years and had two happy children. Together they showed us around the house.

The house had been decorated in the wife’s style — lots of Victorian stuff everywhere, feminine — it matched the Victorian outside of the farmhouse. They joked about how the house was her domain — and his shit was out in the barn. Sure enough, he had renovated the barn and built a beautiful multi-room office and den adjoining the horse stables. That’s where he kept his stuff and whiled away his time.

They seemed exuberant about all their new stuff. Happy.

As we drove away, I told my parents they were going to break up.

My mom and stepdad thought I was nuts. That I was being negative and imagining stuff. When they asked me why I thought that, I told them –

There was no room for him in that house.

It wasn’t something I thought about consciously. I didn’t arrive at their home intending to analyze their marriage. I just moved through the tour — and listened to what they said — and got this overwhelming feeling. She’s pushing him out. There’s no room for him here. I didn’t think it. I felt it.

And by the time we drove away, the feeling was so overwhelming, I knew they were going to break up.

They broke up a couple years later. We always know more than we know.

We’re like fly-paper as we move through the world: we pick up everything. We’re stickier than internet memes, as thin-skinned as newborns. Stuff bombards us — and we can’t possibly notice or act on it all the time. But it enters us, it settles in us like heavy metals in our blood, our organs. And when a given piece reaches a critical mass — a clot forms and breaks free and bumps us — the balance shifts — suddenly we’re struck with –

There’s no room for him in that house.

We know more than we know. Finding out what it is we know is a matter of distracting the conscious mind and seeing where your attention shifts. What non-sequitors pop up? What are you reminded of, out of nowhere? These things seem like they have nothing to do with each other. When looked at together, they make meaning. They tell you what you know.

One way to look at a story is an effort to distract the focus of your audience in order to make meaning out of the pieces that emerge when they’re not looking. By the end, the audience knows more than they know.

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