The Girl Detective

We got the apartment! The one in the good neighborhood! It’s exactly one mile from a bunch of cafes and shops and about thirty feet from the ocean! There’s a yoga place nearby that offers $12 classes! You can walk to Acres of Books and the L.A. Metro! There are bars on our front window! Is that a good or a bad thing! I don’t know! Who cares! We’re going to paint the walls next weekend!

Okay, so I’m feeling a tiny bit of buyer’s remorse, but who doesn’t after putting down a four digit deposit? Basically, the situation was this: in Long Beach, the wealthiest neighborhoods are all in the southeast corner of the city, and the goodness (craftsman houses, safe streets, etc.) radiates out from there. So you want to be as far south and as far east as possible. Our apartment is as far south as you can get - like I said, the beach is about a block away - but it’s pretty far west. (I realize that I’m very close to telling the universe not only who I am, but where I live, so I’ll say no more. Once I had a dream of keeping this blog completely anonymous. Ha ha ha.) There was another apartment we were considering (not the seedy one) that was further east - much closer to restaurants and stuff - but it was more expensive, and we wouldn’t be able to see the actual unit until the current tenants moved out, and although the managers assured us that it was identical to the unit we had seen and even though we couldn’t sign anything yet we were totally first in line and don’t worry, there would be absolutely no unpleasant surprises, we decided to go with the bird in the hand. Which is awesome. Did I mention it has a separate dining room? This bird has a separate dining room. And a dishwasher. And a stainless steel refrigerator, which I guess is better than a white one for some reason.

So I’ve got a wonderful fiancé and a great place to live. Life would be great if I had something resembling a career. Maybe I will in a few months. I don’t know. More than one smart person has told me that my novel’s good, but when I look through the manuscript, I can’t see what they’re talking about. I find page after page of awkward sentences and flat characters. And I can’t seem to get started on my next one, either. I’m so worried that the story is dumb and I don’t know what I’m talking about (what in the world does a mook like me know about space travel?) that I can’t put down the first sentence. I keep taking my notebook to coffee shops and then stalling out for two hours. Am I psyching myself out, or is my intuition telling me that I secretly don’t want to write this book? If I secretly don’t want to write it, why don’t I have any other ideas?

And also, you know, the teaching thing. I’m being loaded up with hours in a job that has very little to do with what I want to teach. At the moment I’m teaching fifteen hours a week, not counting prep time, and getting $300 for it. My throat is sore from talking when I finish each day. And this job wants me to take on three private students in addition to my two classes. And my other job, once it starts, is probably going to give me 10-15 hours of tutoring a week. (Looks like I didn’t need to worry about getting enough hours after all.) And neither of these jobs will go anywhere. I need to get more experience at a university in order to apply for writing positions. But if I can’t pick up any lecturer work this fall, I might just quit the whole racket and try to find copyediting work or something, in the hopes that my novel will do well enough to qualify me for professorships. Then at least I wouldn’t have to talk about SAT vocabulary for two and a half hours straight.

Is my lack of writing inspiration stemming from or leading to my frustration with work? I have no idea. I’m just afraid this next novel is going to suck. I’m afraid the idea I have for the prologue is boring. I’m afraid the plot hinges on improbabilities so ridiculous that readers will gleefully read passages aloud to each other and then chortle together. Like I do with Dan Brown novels in the bookstore.

And I know the obvious advice is “just write the damn thing and worry later!” It sounds so simple, right? You’d think I’d be able to just do it.

Maybe I’ll feel better once we move and I have my own desk again. But how long am I going to go with no time to write? When am I going to start making the salary that someone with my intelligence and credentials deserves?

I’ve got three-week old emails I haven’t returned, comments I’m just now responding to, and a post on women in fiction that I haven’t even started yet. Here’s why:

1. Tom and I have been apartment-hunting. Right now we’re trying to decide between a really beautiful apartment in a seedy neighborhood and a bland apartment (which can, of course, be decorated) in a better neighborhood. If we were offered both apartments on the same day, we’d probably take the bland one, but we’ve basically already been offered the beautiful/seedy one and we won’t know if we get the bland one for a few more days. The beautiful one also comes with some ethical baggage, which would make our decision easier if we knew for certain that we had a choice. When we went to look at it today, it quickly became clear that the property manager is trying to help gentrify the neighborhood; he made more than one comment about us being the “type of people” he wants in the building, and even discriminated against a black single mother right before our eyes. It wasn’t over the top - he was perfectly polite to her - but she still got the message pretty quick.

2. Tom and I got a Wii.

I got the second job, and to celebrate, I’ve plunged into Twilight Princess and Cooking Mama. At some point I want to get Trauma Surgeon. We haven’t yet dared probe the depths of the games available to download, although once Mario 3 becomes available (I have no idea when that’s going to be) I’m going to have to nab it.

3. I’ve been trying to find good books on space travel.

Does anyone know of good books on space travel? I’m specifically looking for recent fiction or nonfiction dealing with NASA - stories that take place in Houston or Cape Canaveral (as opposed to the actual shuttle or ISS) and/or give a general overview of who does what and how the staff is organized. I basically need to learn how a mission gets off the ground, so to speak. I already have Riding Rockets and Skywalking.

Now, don’t worry, all - things’ll get back on track on Monday, when I start teaching and thus have a lot more free time.

…wait, hang on. That doesn’t make sense at all.

Someone found my site yesterday by searching for “naked woman.” I love the scenario - a young stallion is surrounded by women, but they all have clothes on all the time and he hears there’s good stuff under there, so he constantly wonders where he could find some with their clothes off. He can’t ask them, of course, and he’s too young for a girlfriend. He hears magazines exist, but where would he procure one?

Then, one day, in the midst of a message board argument about whether Peach or Daisy is hotter in Mario Kart, it hits him: the Internet.

He hastily closes the message board without even checking the fan fiction forum and opens Google. What, he wonders, are his chances? Would the Internet contain such subject matter? Has anyone ever done this before? He tries not to get his hopes up as he types in the words. This will most likely be another dead-end search. After all, who ever heard of naked women on the Internet?

He presses Enter.

.0001 seconds later, he is a man.

Here’s an excerpt from my 2/5/05 entry on my old blog:

I started a longer project, writing-wise - I’m tentatively calling it a novel, although I don’t want to jinx myself. I have this problem with writing long things. I’ve trained myself, for the sake of getting through slush piles and word limits, to write as short as possible, and usually I can say what I need to say in a few sentences, but now I can’t break out of it.

Well, I guess I got over that hurdle. Two and a half years and one graduate program later, it’s done.

Which I know is about the most naive thing a writer can possibly say, since I’m satisfied with about .01% of it and I know my agent and (here’s hoping) my editor will each have a mountain of revisions to suggest. But the manuscript is complete - that is, every page is there and every note I’ve written to myself has been incorporated - and my agent has been waiting for it for months, and I’m sick of looking at it, and it’s going in the mail tomorrow. Here are the specs:

Pages: 348 (12 point Times New Roman)
Chapters: 7
Major characters: 5
Very important and culturally relevent themes: 3 (identity construction, self-effacement, arrested development (NO, not like the show, although the story does take place in Orange County))
LOLs: plenty
;_; : some
wangst: get the fuck out of here

Thanks to the four people who voted on the title. And to the seventy-six people who lurked - you suck so bad I can’t even believe it. Truth be told, I don’t really like those two ideas either, but I haven’t been able to come up with anything better. The Lost Ones sums up many of the threads in the book, but sounds pretentious and maudlin. Clementine is catchier but doesn’t add much to the story. Guh. I don’t know. I’ll probably leave it to someone else to decide; the publishing industry routinely retitles books anyway.

And what’s next, you ask? I’ll sum up my second novel in one word: SPACE.

But in the meantime, I’m going to stick a rubber nipple on a bottle of champagne and spend the next few hours feeling very, very proud of myself.

Which is a better title for a book? Like if you were in a bookstore and you saw these side by side, which would you reach for first?

The Lost Ones

Clementine

If you’re reading this, you HAVE to answer. WordPress gives me hit counts. I can tell when people are lurking.

Three (3) awesome things you should know about:

One of my former classmates, David Hoon Kim, has a short story in this summer’s fiction issue of the New Yorker. (It contains theoretical physics!) There’s also an interview with him in the online version.

Another of my former classmates, Rachel Swirsky, has an apocalyptic story up at Subterranean Online. Read it now.

A third of my former classmates, Katie Chase, has a story about arranged marriages coming out in the next issue of the Missouri Review. This story was the first workshop submission I ever read in grad school, and I couldn’t put it down.

If these writers can’t put to rest once and for all the idea that MFA programs are producing clones, then no one can. Their writing is fanciful, intriguing, beautiful, and fun.

As for me, oh, you know… just dealing with the ol’ inferiority complex. My therapist says I’m making a lot of progress - today I didn’t stick my head in a hole even once. Of course, it’s only 1:30.

I first came across this video of Bill O’Reilly a couple of days ago, but it wasn’t until I read the transcript on Feministe that I really thought about it:

But do you understand what the New York Times wants, and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, which you’re a part, and so am I, and they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have.

I was all set to do my usual “Bill O’Reilly’s a fucktard” eye roll when I read this, but then I realized that he’s exactly right. That is what I want. I do want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure. I’m not interested in doing it by flooding the country with foreign nationals, and I find the Right’s obsession with immigration as pathetic as it is delusional, but I do want to get rid of the system that automatically places white men in positions of power and forces us to look at every idea, lifestyle, or scientific advancement through the lens of one religion. I guess O’Reilly probably believes that us liberals don’t want any white men in power at all, which is funny, but at least we can both agree that he’s a white supremacist and I’m not. I’m comin’ to get you, Bill! BOO!

Oh, by the way, I finished grad school and stuff. I am now a Master of Fine Arts. I’ve been trying to come up with a poetic rumination on important life changes etc. for about three weeks now, but have realized that forced poetic ruminations are lame, so I’ll boil it all down to this: I need a job. Well, actually, I just got a job, but it’s part time, so I need another job. I may even need a third job, if neither my current job nor the job I’m likely to get give me enough hours. I’ve been running simulations on my laptop’s super advanced calculator, and no matter which combination of hours and salaries I plug in, I can’t get up to 20K a year, which is my (increasingly unrealistic) goal.

The problem is that I want to teach, and the whole field is a mess. The type of teaching jobs I’m interested in and eligible for don’t pay well, considering the skills and experience needed - most lecturers and SAT tutors make about $20-30 an hour - and there’s a perpetual shortage of hours because, well, the average class or tutoring session is only 2 hours long. My current job (English enrichment and SAT prep at a private institute) is giving me two classes and a private student, and I’ll still barely make $200 a week. If I work the same number of hours for the company that’s considering hiring me (another private SAT prep gig) then I’ll be up to $400 a week, or $1,600 a month, or $19,200 a year. Giving myself time to write isn’t a part of this equation.

And that’s not even factoring in the lecturer jobs I’m going to try for in the fall. (If I get one, I’ll quit or cut back one of the SAT jobs.) I need experience teaching composition at the college level because professorships teaching exclusively creative writing are extremely rare. Creative writing isn’t considered a “real” discipline - although, hell, English is barely considered a “real” discipline these days - so instead of hiring writers to teach writing, universities hire well-rounded instructors to teach everything. I’m overloading myself right now in the hopes that after a couple of years, I’ll be able to find a teaching job with a good salary and a sensible schedule.

Also, I must say that I really resent the fabulously successful writers who advocate working easy, dead-end jobs in order to give yourself writing time. Because what happens if I temp or wait tables for ten years and then don’t make it big like they did? Am I less serious about my writing if I want a job with upward mobility (especially if that mobility will lead to more writing time)? I feel like there’s this idea that not wanting to be on the verge of bankruptcy is exactly equivalent to being bourgeois and materialistic. But maybe I’m sniping at straw men.

Also, I’m still trying to get my novel revised. I told my agent I’d send it to her by the end of May; now I’m fighting to get it done before I start teaching at the end of June.

I realize it’s kind of weird to talk about all this in a post that started with Bill O’Reilly. I’m not trying to connect my own problems to the conservative agenda, although I could, if I felt like talking about arts funding or government subsidized higher education. I do think it’s funny, though, that millionaires are biting their nails over the scary liberals while I’m working two (or three) jobs. Sorry to disappoint you, guys - I’m too busy teaching to sneak illegal immigrants into your homes.