Girl in a Cage

Throwing off the Shackles of Microsoft Word

I am not one of those people who hates Microsoft.  I own an XBox 360 and am quite satisfied with it.  What I hate, though, is stuff that doesn't work the way it's supposed to. 

I don't know anybody who loves Microsoft Word.  And I know a lot of people who hate it.  It's expensive, it takes up way too much hard drive space, it's needlessly complicated by functions you're never going to use, and when you need it to do something slightly complicated, it screws it up.  (For example, could I use a tab stop without  changing the margins on my entire paragraph? Is that really too much to ask?  Apparently it is.) 

But Microsoft Word is the thing that everybody uses, so you've got to be able to save things in .doc format.  Fortunately, almost any word processing program will now allow you to do that, so there's really no reason to keep suffering with Microsoft Word.  Here are some of the options I've investigated:

Open Office  I haven't really used this one, though I did download it onto an old computer.  Someone else said it's not really any better than Word.  But it also isn't any worse.  And it's free, which automatically makes it better. 

Scrivener  This one's for Mac only.  I tried it out for one project (that was requested, and subsequently rejected, by an editor.  wtf.) and found it wasn't really for me.  It's got a lot of cool features-- you can make notes on virtual note cards and rearrange them, move scenes around, work in a two-pane window with your research on one side and your writing on the other.  Overall it's incredibly cool.  It's free to try for 30 days and 40 bucks to buy the full version. 

Having said all this, I didn't really like it much.  I am not an outliner or a note taker, and while I do some research, it's not enough to warrant using something like this.  I also don't tend to think of my books in terms of discrete scenes, which is the way Scrivener forces you to organize things.   It's also cumbersome to export your individual scenes into one big file.  I think it would be very useful for academic writing, and for some creative writers, it's a godsend.  It doesn't fit with my style, though.

Google Docs  A barebones online word processor.  Certain things about it are very handy--your work is accessible anywhere which means you can work on your projects from different computers without toting a flash drive around.  Your work is automatically backed up to the Google servers.  I suppose it would be wise to keep your own backup as well, but if the Google servers go down, the entire US economy is probably going with them, and your lost manuscript will probably be the least of your problems.  I like the fact that if you use gmail you can automatically convert any attached document to google docs with one click.  Downside--when I tried to upload an entire YA book to share with a collaborator, google docs balked at the size of the document (about 200 pages.)  That's an annoyance.  Also, there are certain features I do want to be able to keep--for example, if one of my editors puts marginal comments in one of my manuscripts (typescripts, whatever) I want to be able to see them. As of this writing, google docs won't allow that. Still, this is almost always a good and convenient and free choice.

Zoho  My personal favorite of the bunch.  Another online word processor like google docs--also free, but with a little better design and more features--so the marginal comments still show up.  I was able to upload the same book to zoho without any difficulty. Overall I feel that the design and use is really intuitive.  It's a matter of personal preference, but I like this one a lot--better design, better features, same price. (free!)  Downsides include the fact that it's a competitor to google, which means there's always a chance they'll be crushed like a bug and all the work you have on their servers will disappear. You can't do the one-click conversion from gmail (though they do give you a zoho.com email address when you sign up, so maybe you could convert instantly from that.)  Also, the difficulty I face with online word processors is that my computer doesn't play nice with the free coffee shop wifi 100% of the time.  It's probably 90%, but still--I'd hate to get out and be unable to work on the project I wanted to for that reason.  Still, for now, I think this is my go-to word processor. 

Tofu  Not a word processor, but a reader program that allows you to read documents scrolling side to side instead of up and down.  Doesn't seem like it would make a big difference, but when I had to read some longish documents on my computer, it made a huge difference in how long I was able to read on the screen and how sick I got of doing it.  (free, and Mac only.)

When I Wrote Full Time

I recently had occasion to read some horseshit about how writing full time is really hard and how it takes courage to wrestle with your muse and such like things. 

I know this is a common myth because when I wrote full time, people used to say stuff to me like "wow, that takes an incredible amount of discipline".

This myth is propagated by full time writers to disguise the fact that, for the most part, writing full time is a laughably easy job.

I mean, yeah, sure you wrestle with your work, but most of us who write do it because it's fun.  So even a bad day of writing is still pretty fun--after all, somebody's paying you to make up stories.  And, I mean, it takes discipline to force yourself to write for a couple hours every day, but not anywhere near as much as it takes to, for example, get up every day and be civil to a group of teenagers at seven thirty in the morning, which is what many high school teachers have to do.

Here's what my day used to look like when I was a full time writer:

Wake up 7ish.

Help the kids get off to school.

Walk the dog.

Work out.

Shower.

Head to the coffee shop and write for 2 or 3 hours.

Come home and eat lunch.

Nap.

Email, blog, etc.

Be a full-time after school parent.

Oh yeah, I also got the exact same vacations as my entire family, and I could take a day off whenever I wanted because a friend or relative was in town or even just because a movie came out that I wanted to see.   Oh yeah, it was a rough life. 

Now, there were some challenges, but they had very little to do with the actual writing.  The biggest challenge was financial.  My advances were steadily declining, but my household expenses weren't.  This made me kind of obsessed with my sales, with the promise of movie deals, and with "breaking through"--getting a bestseller, becoming a household name, and being able to make enough money to contribute to the household. 

This actually made writing less fun.  I mean, don't get me wrong.  I used to work in a job where I took out the lunch trash and sorted the mail and was supervised by a foulmothed tyrant--my worst day ever at writing was still way, way better than that.  But still, the financial stress did make it less fun to stay home and make up stories.  When you're hoping that everything you write will lead you to that bestseller status that you totally deserve but that has strangely eluded you thus far, you just start second guessing everything .

The other thing that got challenging was the isolation.  Even in a coffee shop where I got to know the staff and the other regulars, it wasn't like having co-workers.  I am now lucky enough to work in a place where I really like my coworkers and my students, and exercising the social side of my personality on a daily basis makes me a far healthier person.  

Also, I mean, the world is where the stories are.  I think this is why so many full-time writers end up writing about writers.  Because after a while, you lose touch with the rest of the world, and it gets harder to write authentically about the experience of people who don't live inside their own heads all day.

So there you go.  There were significant downsides, and, overall, I am much happier in my work now than I was when I was writing full time.  I like the immediate satisfaction I get from teaching, and I enjoy my writing a lot more now--I would still like to have a bestseller, but as long as I'm actually getting paid to make up stories, I'm pretty happy and I can focus on how lucky I am to be a published writer instead of how much I envy the talentless hacks who sell more than me.

And yet there are still days when I really miss it. Especially the daily napping.

Drag Me to Hell and the Truth of Horror

I’ve written before about why I love horror movies. I recently (finally!) caught Drag Me to Hell and really loved it. It’s a fun, nasty, completely un-clichéd thrill ride of a movie, but what I really liked about it was the ending, about which I will speak in spoilerific detail below.

If you haven’t seen the movie yet, please enjoy the trailer!

Okay, so at the end when she is, in fact, dragged to hell because she shoved the quarter rather than the button into the mouth of the dead gypsy woman, I laughed aloud in the way you often will when somebody gets you with a good joke. I really liked the way they flashed the title onto the screen right at the end as if to remind you how stupid you’d been: “it’s called Drag Me To Hell! Did you really think she wouldn’t get dragged to hell?” And the more I thought about this ending, the more I liked it.

Because it tells a truth that most entertainment doesn’t get to tell. She accepts responsibility for the bad thing she did, she reveals herself to be a fundamentally good person (she won’t condemn even the lying weasel who’s her rival at work to be dragged to hell by foisting the button off on him), and she fights heroically for her survival. And she gets dragged to hell anyway. Because sometimes that’s what happens.

The myth of entertainment, and, indeed, the myth that animates a lot of our thinking about adversity is that it is something to be triumphed over. But sometimes adversity crushes or kills you. Sometimes there is no redemption. Sometimes you can’t be saved. I suppose there are other movies in other genres that explore this same idea, but when they do, they are incredible downers. Shanghai Triad comes to mind—fantastic movie, and the ending is just devastating. These are not the kind of movies you really want to go out and see for fun on a Saturday night. But this movie gave me an incredibly downbeat ending and had me actually laughing with delight. That’s a pretty neat trick.

The New Classic Rock

Here's something to ponder:  in one year, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" will be as old as "Stairway to Heaven" was when "Smells Like Teen Spirit" came out. 

Which means pretty much that Nirvana, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Smashing Pumpkins, and Stone Temple Pilots are now the old people's classic rock that's clogging up the radio and preventing newer stuff from getting heard.  Stone Temple Pilots are, I think, analagous to Bad Company--a  band that nobody actually likes, but nobody hates actively enough to run screaming to the radio to turn them off. Ideal for commercial radio, actually, since commercial radio exists in order to deliver ears to advertisers, and the dull and inoffensive serve that purpose well.  Dull music is actually better than excellent music--because for music to be excellent, it has to really speak to certain people, which means it's going to not speak to other people.  Music that one person loves is, I think, far more likely to be offensive than music that somebody doesn't mind.

And yet, I am sick to death of hearing the same "alternative" songs over and over and over again. The dull and inoffensive have, by dint of excessive airplay, become offensive.  It's driving me away from radio.  (I would continue to listen to satellite radio, but my receivers kept getting stolen.)

Probably the internet is going to kill radio anyway.   I kind of hate to see the radio go, but it'll be a small price to pay to never have to hear "Santeria" or "Under the Bridge" again.

Teabag This

Right now the Republican senatorial candidate in Massachusetts is threatening to make the race interesting.  This is largely because he's been funded by out of state teabaggers.  That is to say, people who subscribe to the strange ideology of anger epitomized by the "tea party" movement, not people who put their testicles in other people's faces, though I do think the two are related.

Jimmy Carter said this about the virulent opposition to Obama: "...that racism inclination still exists. And I think it's bubbled up to the surface because of the belief among many white people, not just in the south but around the country, that African Americans are not qualified to lead this great country. It's an abominable circumstance, and it grieves me and concerns me very deeply."

I think he's right, sort of.  I think the fact of Obama's election has overturned a fundamental belief of most Americans, which is that a black man could never be president.  This isn't limited to white people:  Michael Franti sang "Can you see us in the white house?  No you can't!" in 1994.  So Obama's election overturns what people took to be a given, and it's kind of scary to a lot of people.  Because if an unquestionable truth suddenly turns out to be wrong, maybe everything is uncertain!  I do think people feel right now like a lot of things are in flux, and that's scary.  And people usually react to fear with anger. 

Note--I'm not saying that everyone opposed to Obama's policies is necessarily racist.  But I do think the fear and anger that a lot of white people are feeling are a result of their own unconscious racism.  And I think Scott Brown in Massachsetts is tapping into this.  He's an old school white guy who's running against a woman and who promises to thwart the black guy.  White people, especially men, look at this and see an opportunity to restore what always seemed to be the natural order.  Now, again, I know there are principled Republicans who will vote for Scott Brown for policy reasons, but the opposition to Coakley and Obama doesn't seem to be rational.  It's all about raw emotion, this deep anger over...what, exactly?  I have looked at their websites and read their tweets and facebook posts, and it really seems incoherent to me.  It's not about policy.  It's just fear.

The majority of white people are not rich.  But they've always been able to comfort themselves in the knowledge that while they might not be rich, at least they're not black.  If being black is no longer a signifier of inferiority, then suddenly white people without money have nothing to feel good about.  This is another reason for the anger.  (This cuts both ways--many black academics and pundits have built careers on saying that black men can't get a break in America, which is why they so gratefully jumped all over the Gates affair, which was nothing more than "rich guy being a jerk to cop doing his job.")

I'm glad that the world is not the way I grew up believing it was.  I find it refreshing.  But a lot of people are really scared.  I hope they get over it, 'cause it's kind of ugly.

I Don't Care About Anything Seth Godin Says

I have met some cool people through twitter, and I enjoy the little mini fragmented conversations I have there. 

But here's what I don't like about twitter:  somebody's always quoting or linking to Seth Godin.  Seth Godin is apparently a marketing expert, one whose primary expertise seems to be marketing himself as The Only One Who Sees Clearly How The Internet is Changing Everything.

Publishing folks in particular are kind of obsessed with How The Internet Is Changing Everything these days, and well they might be,  and so many of them quote Seth and link to Seth, and nobody yet has explained to me why I'm supposed to care what this guy thinks.  He ran a  book packaging company.  He started a cultish website touted on wikipedia as "one of the 500 most visited websites in the world." (I am suspicious of those stats, as only one porn site is listed in the top 50.) And he's written a lot of books about marketing. 

But this doesn't mean that he knows the future or that his pronouncements about what businesses have to do to survive should be taken especially seriously.  Probably like most prognosticators, he'll be right sometimes and wrong other times.  And the fact that he says something gives it no additional weight in my mind. 

Think for yourself!  The hell with that guy!  Or, if you want to slavishly follow the pronouncements of a self-styled expert, I'm right here!

Advice for Parents Dealing With Schools

School administrators are lying, backstabbing weasels. (the overwhelming majority of them.  Some are not, but they are rare creatures indeed.)

To be fair, this is pretty necessary to succeed at the job.  Principals in particular have to appear to be serving three different constituencies at once:  parents, staff, and the central office.  (students--not really on the radar except as far as they are attached to parents.)

What you need to remember as a parent dealing with school administrators is that they are lying to you.  As was famously said of somebody by somebody else, every word they say is a lie, including "the."  Also, as a parent, you are the least important of the school administrator's constituencies.  Because, assuming they stay employed, they'll still be dealing with the staff and the central office long after you are out of their hair. 

What does this mean for you as a parent? 

1.)There is no such thing as sexual harassment, or bullying, or really any type of offense in school that involves your child being unsafe.  Or, rather, the school administrators will never find that such a thing has happened in their school.  Because if they admit it, they will open themselves up to a lawsuit.  (this would put them into conflict with the needs of the central office.)  So whatever the handbook says about what they will do if such a thing happens, remember: they will turn stunning logical cartwheels to find that it didn't happen.

2.)Your child with special needs will not get the services they are legally entitled to.  This is true regardless of geography or income.  Because to actually follow every ed plan would cost too much money and probably require additional staff.  (again, conflict with the central office, and possibly the staff as well.)

So what can you do?  Well, remember this, as it cuts both ways:  school administrators are very busy and don't want to talk to you.  Therefore, they will tell you anything to shut you up and make you go away.  As long as you realize that whatever they tell you in the first meeting is a lie, you will be fine.  Just don't expect that any problem with a school will ever be fixed with one meeting.  The first meeting is the weedout meeting.  The second meeting is where you actually prove you're serious.  Many parents are too busy with the rest of their lives to hound the school on multiple occasions, so the game plan is to promise you the moon in meeting one, and, in the unlikely event meeting two ever happens, they might actually deliver, say, a small asteroid. 

As long as you are prepared to make a nuisance of yourself, you can get what you want.  Just don't expect it to happen the first time.

The Genius of Jersey Shore

Regular readers know I am a reality TV fan.

I do not think, as so many observers do, that this genre is inherently terrible, and, indeed, I enjoy and appreciate the lengths people will go to in order to humiliate themselves for my amusement. 

In general, I prefer the competition-based reality shows, though, strangely, I've never gotten into Survivor, which is kind of a middlebrow competition.  I like the highbrow competition of Project Runway and the lowbrow competition of Charm School and Miss Rap Supreme.  Okay, I prefer the lowbrow competition.  By a pretty wide margin.  But I like Project Runway anyway.  Let me state again for the record that I am a heterosexual man.

(Aside:  as a teacher, I really admire Tim Gunn's pedogogical style.  He really does a great job of guiding his "students" to do the best work they're capable of. I aspire to have this ability that seems to just come naturally to Tim.)

Besides, non-competitive reality TV really reached its apex back in 2001, with Temptation Island.  For those of you who don't remember this, they took a bunch of "committed couples" to a resort in Belize, separated them by gender, and surrounded them with beautiful idiots to "tempt" them.  And then their significant others would have to watch video of them on dates with other idiots!  Can anyone who saw it forget the look on Billy's face as he watched Mandy licking salt off another man's nipple before doing tequila shots with him?  Oh, that was excellent TV. (Bored at work?  Pop those headphones in and watch it here!  You're welcome!)

Anyway, I thought nothing could top Temptation Island.  And then came Jersey Shore.  Self-described Guidos and Guidettes are placed in a house in Seaside Heights.  They must pull occasional shifts in a t-shirt store but otherwise have nothing to do but go out and get hammered and be incredibly stupid. Why is this incredibly compelling TV?  The cast is both loathsome and pathetic, and, despite their admirable physiques, not particularly attractive to my way of thinking.  And, of course, nothing is really at stake.  (And yet one participant has already managed to get kicked off, which is a pretty remarkable achievement.)

 I've always identified with this line from the Minutemen:  "Thinking too much can ruin a good time."  I've always been an overthinker, and I suspect it's cost me some fun over the years.  And I've wondered--what must it be like to go through life unencumbered by any shred of self-awareness, empathy, conscience, or basically any thinking at all?  What might it be like to be a rampaging, unchecked id in an ostensibly adult body? 

Jersey Shore, week after week, provides the answer.  And, like the booty shorts you can buy in Seaside Heights say, I love The Situation.

Funeral for a Friend

I had the distinct displeasure of attending a memorial service for a dear friend on Sunday.  I mean, it was a beautiful service, there were people there I was delighted to see, and yet, who the hell wants to ever have to go to such a thing?

I've alluded in this space to my complicated feelings on the death of my friend who inexplicably shut many of us out in the last year of her life after her diagnosis with breast cancer and who, despite being a brilliant scientist and the smartest person I've ever known, pursued quack cures that did little or nothing to slow the progress of her disease.

But what really sticks with me from this weekend is how much I miss my friend.

On Saturday, my Mom and I went to see Me and Orson Welles, and it felt strangely appropriate.  It's a delightful little movie that is essentially a love letter to the theater.  It's also a sort of familiar coming-of-age story of a naive young man who learns about the cruelty and cynicism of the world, but it's mostly about the joy of being involved in a creative endeavor and how complicated geniuses can be. It really is totally charming and sweet without being cloying, and I think you should go see it. (Here's the trailer!)

I met my friend when we were in a play together, and though neither of us pursued careers in the theater, it had a lifelong impact on both of us.  She often served as the stage manager in high school productions, and I think there was something of that role in how she lived her life:  in all of her various stages and pursuits, she always seemed to me to be consciously creating a life rather than simply blundering through it.  And I think that stage-manager role may account for part of how she handled her illness and death. Perhaps because we didn't fit in this particular production, many of us got cut.  This feels cruel, and it was,  but it's also strangely kind of admirable--to the last, she was stage-managing a production, and while the cruelty seems unlike the woman who befriended a bizarrely diverse array of people in her life, the desire to create a production that was exactly as she wanted it to be feels wholly consistent with the person I knew. 

When I saw her and her family last year, she had, unbeknownst to me, already been diagnosed.  I remember thinking even then that her choices were certainly not choices I would ever make (attachment parenting would have certainly led me to suicide, infanticide, or both), but she had really built a nice life that suited her very well.

My mom quoted Tennessee Williams to me this weekend.  It seems to fit my friend very well, though I can't clearly explain why Here's the quote:

Then what is good? The obsessive interest in human affairs, plus a certain amount of compassion and moral conviction, that first made the experience of living something that must be translated into pigment or music or bodily movement or poetry or prose or anything that's dynamic and expressive--that's what's good for you if you're at all serious in your aims. William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. "In the time of your life--live!" That time is short and it doesn't return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.

I'm still making sense of all this--well, I'm never going to make sense of it, but I'm still trying to get to a place where I'm comfortable with how little I understand. 

Here's a bad 2nd-generation photo of me and my friend in a 7th grade production of "Oliver".  My mouth is open because I'm singing "I'd Do Anything For You." 

Goodbye.

My Favorite Books of 2009

Hey folks!  It's year-end wrap-up time, and thanks to Goodreads.com, I have a running record of all the books I read in 2009.  (only 26.  Gotta get my numbers up for 2010!)   So I looked over the books I read in the last year, and I've decided to share my 7 faves with you.  (these reviews originally appeared on goodreads. (except for #1, which originally appeared right here in these very pages! er, screens!  Um, whatever--you know what I mean! ) You can friend me on goodreads and get my book reviews as they happen! And I'll get yours as they happen too!  It's cool--join up!)

#7: Kendra by Coe Booth



This is a really good book. Here's why:

1.)interesting, complex, well-drawn, and realistic characters.

2.)Narrative voice of the main character feels authentic--it sounds like a girl from the projects rather than an adult trying to sound like a girl from the projects.

3.)An urban story that does not involve drugs or shootings (Thank you!)

4.)Great psychological realism that really credibly shows why Kendra makes some pretty bad decisions.

5.)Finally, a book with a realistic and refreshingly upbeat perspective on teen sexuality and female sexuality in general. Unlike so many novels where girls learn that their sexuality is dangerous, Kendra shows that teen sexuality is simultaneously terrifying and fun.

The book's frank and non-preachy depiction of teen sex will probably keep it out of a lot of school libraries, which is a real shame. This is a book people need to read.

#6 The Given Day by Dennis Lahane

I really enjoyed this. Lehane does a fantastic job of bringing 1918 to life. One thing I really liked about this is that we learn so little about what organized labor has done for this country, and this novel takes us into the pre-union days to see what happens when corporate power goes unchecked. So, yeah, I liked it a lot for those reasons. I kind of wanted it to end with more of a bang--after 700 pages, I wanted a spectacular ending, but, overall, this is a hell of a book. 

#5 The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan

Don't be put off by the cover--this is a fantastic horror novel. Like all the best living dead material, it's really about how the remaining humans conduct themselves under extreme circumstances. It's got love, existential dread, and killing zombies with an axe. What the hell else do you want in a book?

#4 The Little Sleep by Paul Tremblay

Loved it. Fantastic, absorbing noir detective story starring a narcoleptic P.I. Smart, funny, surprising. If you like Charlie Huston, you'll probably like this too. Highly recommended.

#3 The Strain by Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan

I read a lot of horror, and this is the first book in a long time that's really creeped me out. The opening sequence is both memorable and very spooky. The rest of the book is fast-moving, action-packed, and, as you might expect from Del Toro, very cinematic.

Yes, there are a couple of cringeworthy moments, but overall Hogan and Del Toro have succeeded in creating a vampire mythology that is both interesting and scary.

As someone who likes scary vampires, I've just about had it with sparkly romantic vampires and vampire hunters who fall in love with their prey. I guess you could argue that an essential part of the vampire myth is missing here, as these vampires are literally sexless, but it's a very refreshing change to see vampires depicted as a literal plague.

A top-notch thriller. I'll be buying the second one as soon as it comes out

.#2 The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, Volumes 1 and 2 by Gordon Dahlquist

I loved this book. Fantastic adventure novel with hint o' science fiction/fantasy. Well-written, imaginative, tightly-plotted, and tons of fun. My only caveat is that Volume 1 and Volume 2 are really one book that was split up. Don't wait to see if you like the first one--buy both, because the first one ends on a cliffhanger, and you'll be pissed if you have any lag time at all before getting into the second one.

This is a fantastic book I enjoyed more than any I've read in years.

#1 Fool by Christopher Moore

It's King Lear, more or less, told from the point of view of the fool. It is filthy--no, I mean really, really filthy.  It's also hilarious.  It's also got a heart.  It's also Moore's best novel.The fool, Pocket, instigates all kinds of political intrigue that is, to be honest, somewhat hard to follow, even if you've read the play.  (I don't think familiarity with Lear is going to add too much to your reading experience, though a love of Shakespearean wordplay and bawdy jokes certainly is.) So I was a bit lost as to who was supposed to be in love with and/or killing whom, and I didn't care at all, because Pocket is a classic smartass in the Groucho Marx/Bugs Bunny vein-- that is to say, one who can't really seem to take anything seriously, who counts on his persistent wiseassery to deliver him from any scrape.  He is way more explicitly horny than either Groucho or Bugs, though.  There are also witches, a ghost, some shocking revelations about Lear, and a dim-witted giant apprentice fool named Drool.  It's a ton of fun, and I can't recommend it strongly enough, with the caveat that if you're going to find yourself perturbed by a lot of really filthy words on every page, this really isn't the book for you.