Listeners Welcome: In Which I Read “Death’s Shed” by J.M. McDermott
I can’t believe how many times I recorded this story. So many, in fact, that my four year old started repeating the phrase “Death’s Shed” whenever he found me in front of my laptop. The two just things just naturally went together. This was actually the first piece I attempted to podcast. Now, finally, I have a finished recording. It even has an intro and everything.
It’s up on the Small Beer Press web site, my second in the Small Beer podcasting series. You can subscribe to the series via iTunes. I just knew something was wrong when my first episode failed to show up in the iTunes feed. It took a few hours, yesterday, to figure out the obvious: I’d included spaces in my MP3 file names. A big no-no as it turns out. Who knew? Clearly not me…
Next week’s podcast is already recorded. Mike DeLuca was a great. I had a lot of fun hanging out with him while we recorded the interview. Though…I’ve managed to avoid editing the track for the last two weeks. Now the walls are burning (figuratively) as the clock counts down to next Thursday. I need to get it done. But first I need to work on some of my own fiction. Unbelievably, I have a writing deadline later today and the work still isn’t quite finished. What the heck am I doing blogging? What I always do, trusting that panic will drive me to end.
Listeners Welcome: An Interview with Delia Sherman
Delia Sherman and I chat about her novel, The Freedom Maze, her family history and why it took over eighteen years to get this particular book published. Actually we chatted about a month ago, but all that technical stuff takes a little time. Finally, the interview is up. It’s the very first episode in my Small Beer Press podcasting series and the very first podcast I’m filing under Listeners Welcome. I have to say I am very excited, though I suppose that could be the daily dose of caffeine I’m currently consuming. Nah. This really is the biggest of thrills. Delia was one wonderful interview.
Delia Sherman Discusses Her Latest Book, The Freedom Maze with Julie Day of Small Beer Press.
I interviewed Delia in the Small Beer Press offices with Ellen Kushner listening in and even snapping a few pictures. If you look closely, you might notice the plastic container sitting in the middle of the table (Ellen’s idea). I was a little nervous about recording my first interview ever. We decided to make the pink-capped Japanese cookie container my audience. While recording, I was speaking to that little plastic girl and no one else. Turns out there’s nothing like a plastic girl wearing a pink cap to put me at my ease.
The Freedom Maze is being published by Small Beer Press. You can pre-order the book now on the Small Beer Press website. Tune in for my next podcast. Listeners are always welcome.
The Autumn Blues: GroupGrok and Other Mistresses
I’m currently experiencing Silver Medalist Syndrome. I just receive a wonderfully complimentary personal rejection from the Missouri Review. Lots of lovely words were followed by the word “no.” A year ago I would have been thrilled, now it makes me head for the hot cocoa. Over the last few months, along with the slew of form rejections, I’ve received a handful of “almosts” and an acceptance of an old flash piece to a magazine whose Fall 2011 issue seems just a little overdue.
Why haven’t I been blogging? I’m sure that’s the question early mornings at the Kuerig coffee machine. A list of important things I’ve been doing instead.
- Utilizing our new Netflix streaming to watch Dr. Who until eleven at night (after tucking the kids into bed).
- Obsessively playing with noise levels and sibilance issues on my soon-to-be-launched Small Beer Press podcasts.
- Working and reworking GroupGrok.com for its launch next month. Yes, this new site is one bitch of a mistress. Mostly because I haven’t done web work in years and it’s, well, “changed” in the intervening years. Plus it doesn’t help that it’s a shoestring and bubblegum endeavor. What the hell is with this browser-based editing? I want my pro tools back.I’m going to be blogging with four writing friends. I am amazingly thrilled that all of them want to do this. So of course it makes all the sense in the world to spend my time on a project that has no school, work or internship related deadline.
- The final time suck? Thinking about work stuff. You know, my actual day job. It’s been feeling decidedly neglected and is demanding its full share and some until I once again prove my love.
Daily writing just doesn’t stand a chance at the moment and I really resent it. I love my family and I chose my family, but the thing about families (if you love them) is that you can’t ignore their needs just because everyone else is breathing down your neck. I need my little cadre. I even enjoy their company. They make me inordinately happy. In return, they need my time. So it goes.
Avoidance and obsession. My writing is lagging and I can’t help but wonder if the reason that I’m adding yet another spinning plate with the whole GroupGrok.com thing is that my mental space is already overrun. Actual creative work is nothing but a visit to the Head Bangers’ Ball, so why not increase the noise? Until the floodgates finally have the space to open at least I can do something constructive in the the writing “arena.”
GroupGrok.com and the Small Beer Press podcasts are going to be amazing. Really and truly. I feel so lucky to be involved with both projects, but the caterpillar babies, the Rampant and that parade of skeletons also need my attention. The dead, despite what everyone thinks, don’t have all the time in the world. Their stories move forward just like those here on earth. My one and only job is to listen.
Writing Daze
Today I spent a few hours at the Haymarket Cafe getting my writing head back on. After a few weeks of obsessive self-training on podcasting essentials, I’ve finally reached a place where I can relax for a moment and get back to my current writing project, The Rampant. I’ve been writing, of course. But there’s been too little mental space and the results have been disjointed. Now, in the basement cave that is the Haymarket’s dining area, I’ve left all that fretting in some other section of the catacombs.
The Haymarket is just one of my many writing haunts. For me, a writing space is more a place of the ears and the stomach than a physical location. I drink tea: chai, walnut green, jasmine green, Lady Grey. I eat. (Clearly, not a physically necessary component of such an sedentary activity.) I listen to songs I’m not likely to confess to, sometimes on single play sometimes on auto shuffle via little earbuds that are always getting tangled in my newly-long hair. Subconsciously, while writing, I expect to hear the clank and clatter of plates and cups along with the chatter of people (although not loud enough that I’m compelled to listen.) In other words, I require a womb-like atmosphere filled with almost subterranean noises and a steady intake of food. Writing as regression therapy, I suppose.
I have a circle of places I visit. Each location has a shifting ranking related to table height, deviation from the idle decibel level, quality of beverages, parking, and food. My local library has actually made it onto the top ten list. It has to best parking in town.
Oh yes, and, despite being out in public, I hate to run in to people I know. In fact, even a phone call from Tom is, as he has pointed out once or twice, not well received. I say it here in this public space to all who encounter me, my reaction is not personal. Or, more clearly, it is personal. But it’s not about you. Give me an hour or two. Cross paths with me while I’m returning to my car. Trust me, I’ll be enthusiastic. In fact, I won’t shut up. We’ll pass my parked car, but I won’t realize it until two blocks later.
Right now, I’m suspended elsewhere. All you have to do is wait until I emerge.
Being Human Part I
Genetically programmed, the whole lot of us.
For the last few weeks our bathtub has contained a four-inch-high pond of standing water. A strange, industrial flower blooms from the southern edge of the tub. The base of the flower is a brilliant orange, built of a rubber lid opener and a washcloth. Two glossy green stalks rise halfway up the tub walls, economy-sized bottles of Garnier Fructis hair products. Our bath has a slowly leaking plug. This plastic flower arrangement is the only way to keep the water in the tub for more than an hour. It’s also the most effective cat deterrent we’ve yet designed in our war against the kitten.
Humans are made to battle, each other, their surroundings even themselves. I’ve listened to enough Radio Lab and attended enough therapy to understand our minds are built of warring part-selves. Each “self” screams or laughs or simply ignores its surroundings. Opinions are rampant. The loudest voice generally wins. However, for the last month, all that personal noise has been out-shouted by a orange-marmalade kitten.
A list of exciting kitten behavior follows. If we leave our bedroom door open, she toilets on our bed. If we take away the pile of stuff we’ve barricaded along the length of our fine Ikea sectional couch, she pees on it. If we leave the tub empty, she claims it as her liter box. We’ve talked to our vet and given her a course of antibiotics “just in case” it was a physical problem. We’ve even bought extra liter boxes and plastic containers of liter-box herbs guaranteed to attract this latest cat. Then, of course, there are all the sprays.
At the moment, we seem to have reached a truce of sorts. It feels like the Christmas-Day calm in the WWI trenches just before the fighting resumed. It is not going to last.
This could be just another “pet gone wrong” story, but I don’t think so. I can feel it pressing in on me. The nighttime baths after I’ve drained away the pet barricade. The BBC America DVDs of Being Human I watch half-submerged in water. That floaty feeling of transformation. It’s cyclical, the tumbling decay of memory brought on by too little sleep and too much pressure. I’m composing words while I drive, more throughout the corners of my day. Few of those words make it onto the page. That’s okay. In fact, it’s necessary. It’s time to take the everyday, the bathtub common and let all that pressure morph it into some sort of black-winged butterfly that hovers too close, feeding on the exhalations of my breath. It’s time to let the cat do her magic.
Julie Day