Monday, April 7th, 2008
In my work on the fifth book this morning, I’ll be writing a lot about Marcus.
It’s fitting then, to see these notes on his character and motivation from 2001.
Thursday, March 20th, 2008
Minus the in-depth psycho-social commentary on the devastating impact said stench might have had on my two years at the University of Richmond.
(This was a five minute free-writing exercise from 2001 that helped me bust through a brief period of writer’s block at the start of Second Helpings.)
Thursday, March 20th, 2008
Oh. It should be noted that the stench also affected my roommate’s fate at UR: She transferred too.
Thursday, March 20th, 2008
Our next door neighbors’ room did not reek. And they LOVED it there. Coincidence? I THINK NOT.
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
Highlighted in the top margin in one of the last pages of this particular notebook were some scribbled run-on and half sentences from a NYT Times magazine article about baseball pitchers who “forget how to pitch.”
I’m not sure why I jotted this down. Maybe I considered using it in Second Helpings as a way for Scotty to screw up his senior year. Perhaps it was the inspiration behind Jessica’s decision to quit the cross country team. Or maybe it was an extension of my own anxieties about the publication of Sloppy Firsts.
Thursday, March 6th, 2008
One of the challenges of writing a series–especially a sort of accidental, non-serial series like mine is turning out to be–is coming up with creative ways to quickly summarize the important events from the previous books without getting all Sweet Valley High about it. (Did devoted readers of SVH, those of us who had followed the Wakefield twins from SVH#1 Double Love all the way to um, SVH#595892763 Everyone Finally Dies need to be reminded that Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield were golden blondes with aquamarine eyes, perfect size sixes [which would be totally dieted/edited down to size 0 by today's skeletal standards] who wore the 14K gold lavalieres they received on their sixteenth birthdays etc. etc. etc. in EVERY SINGLE BOOK IN THE SERIES?)
I had what I thought was a very clever idea for summarizing Sloppy Firsts in Second Helpings: Jessica would do it via her college application essay. But this would be no mere college application essay, oh no! This would be a college application essay that summed up the first book in the series through the exclusive use of forced descriptions fitting the acronym–readers of yesterday’s (retro)blog entry…just wait for it…you’ll enjoy it–SAT. See, for Jessica Darling, mastering the SAT (test) was easy. But these SATs (from her life) were so much harder to overcome.
My editor was like…Um, no.
She was right.
Wednesday, March 5th, 2008
A typical anxiety dream for me is one in which I’m supposed to take an exam in a math or science class I haven’t attended all marking period or semester, depending on whether the dream takes place in high school or college. I still wake up with the cold sweats from versions of this dream, and I’m 35 years old.
I was never a stellar test taker. In the first draft of this entry I said, “I have never been a stellar test taker.” I switched it to the more definitive past tense because one of the comforts of my adult life is that I will never, ever–oh I hope to God never, ever–find myelf in a situation that will require me to take a test of the sort that gives me cold sweat nightmares. Especially standardized tests. It’s one of the reasons I transferred to Columbia in my junior year of college instead of applying as a senior in high school. (My SAT scores would have eliminated me from the running when I was 18, but by the time I was 20 they were less important because my college transcript proved I had a greater capacity for learning than my so-so test scores indicated.) It’s also one of the reasons I never seriously considered applying to graduate school. I was pretty sure that Columbia would take one look at my hypothetical GRE scores (I never took the test) and revoke my diploma. It’s one of the reasons I thrived as an English major, where essays ruled over fill-in-the-bubble multiple choice exams. It’s why a knack for standardized test-taking is one of the few traits I don’t mind readers assuming I share with my fictional alter ego.
On this notebook page, I document an altogether different kind of anxiety dream, about being on a half celebrity/half civilian version of Survivor. I thought that I might borrow this dream and use it in Second Helpings as a way to express Jessica’s own fears of inadequacy.
But then I didn’t.
Tuesday, March 4th, 2008
I watched Sicko last night. I already know a lot about the flaws in our HMO system, and yet I felt the way I always do after watching a Michael Moore documentary: sad, frustrated, and disenfranchised.
(Note to my foreign readers: Moore has been criticized–perhaps justifiably so–for only showing health care in Canada, Britain, France, Norway and Cuba–CUBA–in the brightest of lights. Seriously, what are the national health care systems like in countries outside the U.S.? Please tell me. This is just for my own edification, not for a book or anything.)
So yeah, I’m kind of bummed out this morning. I’m not so pithy.
Here’s a page from my notebook, including a clip about a college kid who didn’t talk for a year and ultimately inspired Marcus’s own silent meditation in Charmed Thirds, though I had considered it as a plot point in Second Helpings.
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