I’ve written about memoir before, and the recent James Frey brouhaha has gotten me thinking about it all again. I actually haven’t done much work on my book these past couple of months because the avalanche of freelance work I picked up when I thought I might want to quit my job at the Big Corporation, along with a slough of deadlines at said day job have all had me up to my eyeballs in Other People’s Work. But watching the Wrath of Oprah sort of freaked me out. I thought I’d enjoy it more than I did — frankly…
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Okay, here’s what I forgot — if you’ve been writing and editing on a computer screen all day, it is very difficult to read anything else in the evening. It was a long week in the trenches — life at the Big Corporation is kind of hectic, and I was finishing a freelance copyediting job at the same time. Taking on all these freelance jobs while working full time might not have been the smartest idea I every had, but at least I’ll have enough money to renovate my shameful bathroom when I get to the other side (there wasn’t…
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A little zen saying to start off the New Year. I had all sorts of good intentions for my week off — I had freelance projects on deck, and I really really really need to get back to the memoir, which I’ve neglected shamefully in the last couple of months as my “real” job at the Big Company has gotten way better, but also way busier. But as I zoomed through the past couple of months, packing 3 jobs into every day, zinging from deadline to deadline, making them all but driving myself a little crazy in the process I…
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I took last week off — and while I didn’t go to Paris this year, tant pis, c’est trop cher, I must say, I highly reccommend the vacation-at-home. I slept late every day, often with both dogs snoring away in a big snuggly pile in my bed. I got some writing done, and got back on top of the memoir, which had been woefully neglected. I made a little progress on the Secret Life Change — a project that seems to be moving in a two steps forward one step back sort of fashion. And I got some real reading…
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I spent the entire day sucked into Katrina coverage … full geek mode — CNN on the TV, and surfing the web for all I”m worth. The whole thing still makes me sick, and yes folks, the response to this crisis, the fact that we simply abandoned all these people, this is racism. On the other hand, I can’t remember the last time I heard an open conversation on network and cable news stations about racism. Yeah, sure, Tucker Carlson lost his shit with the Rev. Al Sharpton, but on the other hand, when even Tucker Carlson is appalled by…
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What has happened to our country? When did we become a nation who abandons our sick, our elderly, and our poor in the face of what everyone thought was, until the last minute, a Category 5 Hurricane? When did we become the kind of nation that tolerates that our elderly are dying and being left outside the Superdome like detritus? What would have happened if this man hadn’t come along? Would someone’s grandfather just be left out there, dead on a park bench? When did we become the kind of country that just leaves it’s poor and sick and old…
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Hi folks — all is well here at LivingSmall but blogging will be on a tiny hiatus due to the day job, the memoir, the screenplay, and the proposal I’m working up for a book on sustainable farming … too much other writing and I just can’t seem to find the time to keep up the blog for no. But in the meantime you should all go over to the Montana Women For … website and check out the photos of nearly 70 Montana women marching in the Livingston Roundup Rodeo Parade dressed as Statues of Liberty and wearing banners…
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Seattle was great fun — we went to the Cheese Festival at Pike’s Place Market, where we tasted many fine fine cheeses despite the crowds of corpulent tourists who could just as well have been at the free sample booths at Costco for all they cared about beautiful cheese — but who’s to complain? I tasted some lovely goats cheese camenbert, and any number of lovely bleus. I think my stepmother was a tiny bit shocked at what a cheese head I have actually become (that Wisconsin college education must be paying off). I kept saying things like “Point Reyes…
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Sometimes a person just needs a weekend where you really don’t do anything. This is a concept I came to late in life — until I moved to California and got my job at the Big Corporation, I’d always worked at least two jobs, and one of them was usually retail. Which means I didn’t have weekends — I’d have a day off somewhere in the middle of the week, and after a while I managed to get out of working Sundays, and so it was something of an adjustment when Patrick and I moved in together, and those weekends…
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I woke up this morning thinking about a comment that Leah, over at Struggle in a Bungalow Kitchen posted on her website. Apparently, by blogging about domestic life, and in particular, blogging about cooking a nice dinner for her husband and young son on Valentine’s Day, she called down the Voice of the Disapproving Feminists upon her head. Apparently, choosing to love one’s family, and to think about the ways one cares for them, and to blog about this “does next to nothing to promote woman as a healthy, vitally aware, culturally meaningful being in the world.” Clearly, something about…