Bad Advice
Bad Advice Wednesday: The Ex Factor
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 10 comments
Randy and me
I have this ex who demanded a mutual photo-destroying ritual. He was marrying me, and thought that in starting this new chapter we should purge ourselves of all photographic evidence of our exes (this, of course, before digital cameras, iPads, and Facebook.) I balked, reasoned, begged, and he pouted, whined, and bullied, and so I did what any self-respecting writer might do: I lied. Hid the evidence in my parents’ garage, two thousand miles away. I treated this red flag like a napkin I neatly folded into a swan. I wasn’t about to destroy my photos of a four-month-long, cross-country camping trip and National Park extravaganza just because some of them featured my sweet, shy college boyfriend. WTF? Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: A Picture’s Worth a Thousand Words (That I Didn’t Feel Like Writing)
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 5 comments
Writer’s block is a bitch.
So instead of publishing any of the crap that I’ve been trying and failing to make funny for the past week or so, here’s a bunch of pictures of myself. Now you know what I look like when I write!* My dear friend Kate over at P L A T E 3 Photography happened to be following me around with her camera all day when I was trying desperately to write some funny shit for your amusement. It didn’t happen. Instead, I ate some pizza and got drunk in the bathroom about it.**
I shouldn’t be allowed to have the internet. Or, you know. Friends. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Never Surrender! (But be Flexible)
categories: Bad Advice
comments: 2 comments
I have been sick the last few days and have spent most of my time, not with my family or on my work, but in bed with Winston Churchill. I’m on page 742 of The Last Lion, the third part of the great Churchill biography begun by William Manchester, who wrote the first two volumes and did the research for the third, and finished up, quite ably I think, by a journalist named Paul Reid.
It is always fun and inspiring to hang out with Churchill. I love that during WWII when he is flying on a plane with no heat or oxygen, he has the crew design a special oxygen mask so that he can still smoke his cigar. I love that he snorts when someone offers him tea and says that his tea is yellow (whisky). And I love that when he is monologuing while steaming across the Atlantic, and Lord Beaverbrook dares interrupt him, he pats the Beaver on the knee and says “You don’t talk anymore.” (For a different kind of Churchill humor, see our post on National Lampoon’s “The Churchill Wit.”)
But this is Bad Advice Wednesday (something Churchill, sadly, never lived to see) and so it won’t do to just pass along Churchill quips. You are hungry for advice after all! And it turns out that Winston has come for you:
“We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”
Bad Advice Wednesday: Try it Without Words
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 2 comments
Shell beach at Haystack, with mermaid Elysia
I have often been jealous of painters and crafters and bus drivers, who can do their work while thinking of other things, or listening (really listening) to music, or even books on tape. Also cartoonists. When I worked construction, conversation was the balm that sped the day, always a parade of other tradesmen from around the world, and music, often serious, a new Charles Mingus collection, say, with commentary by the plasterer, who had a doctorate in music history, a German guy who’d had to leave home under mysterious circumstance. We’d listen to the same solo fifty times in a morning, everyone tuned in, me sweating pipe, the electricians dropping cable, the carpenters priming baseboards so as not to make a lot of hammer noise, NYC, 1979. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: A Life Stored in Clutter (Celebrate)
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 1 comment
What else is a dresser for?
I am a pack rat, a scrounger, a dumpster diva. A Sanford and Daughter. An Esty-a-holic. I hide it well, as many functional addicts do. If you walked into my kitchen for a glass of water, you’d find an empty sink. You could open the cabinet and select from an orderly, kitschy assortment of airport “state/city” mugs, odd goblets, snifters and tumblers. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Try Not to Die
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 6 comments
It’s hard to type when you’re dead.
This past March I drove up the coast, following the path of Hurricane Sandy, with the coastal activist and geologist Orrin Pilkey.
“Maybe they’ll name a building after you too if you stay alive long enough,” he said.
He was referring, lightheartedly, to a building that had just been named in his own honor, Duke University’s new Orrin Pilkey Marine Science and Conservation Genetics Center in Beaufort, North Carolina.
“The trick is to stay alive,” he added.
* * *
I am thinking lately that Orrin is right. Not that I’m angling to have a building named after me—though the David M. Gessner Jr. Creative Writing Plaza and Waterpark does have a nice ring to it—but that staying alive is a pretty key aspect of the writing life.
Hemingway said something like that too, right? That it kind of sucks to finally feel like you’ve really got some sort of mastery over what you are doing, and that you’ve made it through the spastic turmoil of youth, and then your body has to go and crap out on you. Of course he took that into his own hands, didn’t he? He failed pretty miserably at today’s bad advice.
Don’t Worry, I’m Not Going to Tear My Shirt off and Punch a Critic in the Face, But.
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 33 comments
I’ve just returned from a multi-city book tour. There were happy meetings and reunions, great Q&A sessions, bookstores converted to speakeasies, and at the last stop, a basket of champagne and strawberries from my publisher. I enjoy posting photos from readings and cities I visit to support those who support me–the towns, the bookstores, the reviewers, and the people–but I always hesitate before hitting “upload” because there are quite a few writers out there still trying to find an agent, facing rejection, and unable to get a publisher. This is the exact arrested state of publishing misery in which I resided for nearly a decade, and while I was happy for others and their success, on bad days, seeing it felt like lemon juice in a paper cut. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Twelve Habits of People Who Don’t Give A Shit About Your Inner Peace
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 63 comments
Katherine Fritz
Every damn time someone in my facebook feed posts something like this, I click it. Every damn time.
We all have this facebook friend, right? People you genuinely love and admire. People you like hanging out with. People you invite to your birthday parties. You know. Actual friends. Until you’ve clicked links exactly like this again and again and again. For YEARS. And all of a sudden, you start to wonder if this is some elaborate hoax, if you’ve actually just been reading the same article over and over.
It’s not like I have anything against happiness, or success, or meditation, or yoga, or being nice, or smiling more, or eating healthy, or losing weight, or being your best you, or embracing the day with a positive attitude. Those all sound great. Honestly, they do. And there are some really smart, simple truths to be found in all of those articles. There truly are. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Writing the First Draft
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 15 comments
I just finished spending a couple of months writing a draft of a new book and I thought I’d focus today’s bad advice on the routines of writing that I tried to put in place during that time. The draft I just finished, technically a first draft but not really (I’ll explain), is the most tense, scariest, most exciting and pleasurable and life-sucking. The reason for all this is it is the part where you make something from nothing. For me this means there has usually been a long period of gestation before I begin—of reading, travelling, brooding, journal-writing, osprey-watching, note-taking, outline-making, file-putting in, tape-recording during walks, anxiety attack-having—but when I do begin, I usually really blast off.
This time around my daily schedule during the draft went like this:
4:30/5:00: Get up/feed dog and cat/boil water for tea/make coffee for later/stretch back/eat banana
5:00/5:30: Write Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Tend Your Garden
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 2 comments
I’ve been in the garden a lot these last weeks, enjoying being able to, for one thing, but also getting beds ready and planting and even harvesting: greens galore, and asparagus, and spring garlic, and parsnips, Jerusalem artichokes, radishes, leaves of perennial herbs. The garlic I planted last October before book tour, the lettuce in late February: seeds on snow in a cold frame. The asparagus twenty years ago. Twenty years! I dug a ditch and filled it with composted cow manure from my generous neighbor, dropped the crowns in, buried them, covered the soil with straw. A year later, first shoots. I ate only one–you’ve got to let that plant develop. Second year, three or four spears. Third year a couple of meals. And as much as I could eat most years after that, a lot of it just sliced off below the soil line, brushed on my sleeve, and into my mouth, complex flavors you don’t taste after a day or two, or don’t get at all in less developed soil or with chemical as opposed to organic fertilizer (organic meaning decomposed plant matter, which is to say healthy soil). Continue reading →
