Writing: Daring to be Long

I write short things.

I thought about this while I was considering the possibility of writing 2500-word posts for NaNoWriMo, but this post isn't about NaNoWriMo, it's about why I write short things. At least, I write short things when they're going to be "published"--in other words, blogged.

One piece of standard advice for blogs is to write short things, so that the reader doesn't get bored and run away halfway through. But if I took blogging advice, the title of my blog wouldn't start with "chickenfreak", and I'd be on a self-hosted Wordpress blog with a fancy expensive theme. I'm not big on advice. And the short post advice strikes me as being as valuable as the workplace advice to avoid writing long, detailed documents with actual information, and to instead compress the information on a nice PowerPoint slide with no more than twenty words on it. Who wants to be informed when they can look at something snappy?

And there are successful blogs that do have long posts. Really long posts. I just measured the latest post on Author! Author! and found that it's more than four thousand words. Often the opening mood-setting anecdote on that blog is longer than an entire post on mine. And I'm not naturally concise; I can babble endlessly in forum posts or work documents. I clarify and analogize and clarify the analogy. I go on a lot.

I suspect that my blog posts are short because a long piece of text takes itself seriously, and I hesitate to be seen doing that. It's like my motive for not dressing up--someone who's all dressed up hopes that they look good, and I'm afraid that if I appear to have that hope, people will point and laugh. So today I'm wearing a Lost Boys tee shirt and my last post was less than seven hundred words. Not, of course, that I don't love the Lost Boys tee shirt. It's fabulous; it pretends to be from the Santa Carla boardwalk, and it doesn't say a word about the Lost Boys movie itself.

Also, I don't like my serious writing voice. It rhapsodizes or pontificates or both, and while I'm sometimes pleased with the piece immediately after writing it, I cringe within a week and stay that way. I know that a voice for a serious piece doesn't need to have those flaws; Calvin Trillin, for example, can write about the most serious of subjects and still maintain his comfortable, readable voice. And I have, many times, picked up an over-serious post and scrubbed out the unnecessary gravity, always hoping that I was leaving in any necessary gravity.

On top of that, long posts often require me to have a point of view, and communicate it, and defend it. Apparently I'm not so sure about doing that. I have plenty of opinions, and will argue at length on forums, but, again, this is my blog. You know it's me. People on the street in my town could, in theory, know it's me. So I'm happy to praise things that I approve of, but praise is often brief. When an issue gets thickety or messy, I run away. Again, it's about the point and laugh factor. "Look! She's excited! She's passionate! She has an opinion! Bwahahaha!"

Can you see them all rolling on the floor, while I hide under my keyboard? Of course you can.

I advise others to take risks, because it costs me nothing. I used to love Threads magazine, the sewing magazine from Taunton, when they were still catering to the experienced sewer. They had extreme projects, and once in a while one of those ideas would fall flat on its face, and that level of risk was why they were good. Similarly but more impressively, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival here in town takes the risk of falling on their face many times every single year, and the risk never goes bad on them. They push, they balance on the edge of the cliff, and they never fall.

I don't do that. Cliff? I want a climbing harness and a net. But if I want my writing to progress, I'll have to give up the harness and write about things that I take seriously, like the Lord-of-the-Flies-with-blackboards nature of public schools, or the way that the mental health profession is dead wrong about the nature of hoarders and hoarding, or the dysfunctional parts of my family.

But today, I suspect I'll be writing about perfume. Or food. Or both.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

DCOTD: Books

Dang.

It turns out that Wednesday's box of fancy gardening magazines wasn't taken from the driveway, it was rescued by the neighbors when it looked like it was going to rain. However, they're not re-entering the house; I'll toss them in paper recycling before that happens.

Meanwhile, a friend took a dozen of the outgoing books Thursday, so, woohoo!

Friday, er, nothing went away. Hey, that's not true; another friend took one more book. So there.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

DCOTD: Magazines

I just cleaned the kitchen. The counter was full of groceries, so I took the canisters out of the cabinet, on the theory that canisters are tidier on the counter than miscellaneous boxes and cans.

Then I found the groceries in the backpack. Now the counter is full of groceries again. Also, the toilet paper is stacked on top of the Swiffers, and the paper towels are on the boxes of straws. A sixpack of cider is on the floor because the fridge and the shelves are full.

I need to accelerate the decluttering. So I'm moving the old Declutter Of The Day posts from that abandoned blog to this one. (That is, I'll be entering new DCOTD posts here.) The rules are that a DCOTD is something that left the house. Not something sorted and boxed and ready to go, not something listed on Freecycle, not even something on the driveway with a free sign or in the trunk waiting for the next trip to the GoodWill. It has to be Gone, irretrievable, never to be seen again.

So today's DCOTD is a file box full of garden magazines that someone took off the Free end of the driveway. Yay!

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Books: Wanting Sheila Dead, by Jane Haddam

I rarely trust a novel that mentions the current President by name, or demonstrates an awareness of the latest movies. I'm not saying that an interest in current events is bad. I'm not saying that brand new novels are bad. I'm saying that the combination of the two makes me suspicious. I've read, for example, books from the early eighties that seemed to think that "Hey, wow, I've heard of this Internet thing!" qualifies as a substitute for plot and characters, and I don't like to repeat that experience too often.

So when the jacket of Wanting Sheila Dead revealed that much of the novel is based around a reality TV show, and when the first page contained a side reference to Oprah (who, admittedly, isn't exactly a new phenomenon), I normally would have put the book back on the shelf. But the first page also said:

Sheila Dunham's voice came into the room like battery acid over a bullhorn. That was a metaphor that made no sense. Olivia didn't care. It fit exactly.

That's not something that would come from someone who's saying, "Hey, wow, I've heard of this reality TV thing!" at least not at the expense of the book. So I bought it. I bought it used, so sadly I won't do the author, Jane Haddam, a bit of good, but I liked it so much that I can imagine buying one of her books new. In paperback. There is almost no level of desperation to get my hands on a story that will cause me to pay for a new hardback. So I'll have to wait a while for her next book, though there's a huge backlog of past books that I can work my way through.

The book reconfirms a theory of mine: I like male protagonists, but I like them best when written by women. In my admittedly limited experience, male protagonists written by men tend to be too uncomplicated, too strong, too clear in their purpose. They don't muse. Unlike Haddam's Gregor Demarkian, they wouldn't speculate on how and why the sidewalk in front of the church was washed, or think about their decision to initiate, or not initiate, a handshake with a woman. I like Gregor Demarkian; he seems to be full of stray thoughts.

And I liked the book. There were two mysteries, so the whole book wasn't about the reality TV show, which was a good thing--there's a limit to how much even a good author can do to overcome my severe lack of interest in that topic. But I was engaged by the TV plot, and all of the annoying young woman tied to it, so imagine how much I'd like a Jane Haddam/Gregor Demarkian book without either one.

I recommend the book, and I probably recommend the author more than the book. Which is just as well for the author, because Wanting Sheila Dead is already down to bargain pricing, and the next book is still in hardback. And some of you might buy hardbacks. Maybe. I realize that getting the author paid isn't my problem, but, well, sometimes I think about it.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

SOTD: Jo Malone French Lime Blossom, and Liddle Kiddle Returns Again

I suspect that the good people at Jo Malone would be displeased to know that French Lime Blossom conjures up vivid memories of a thumb-sized plastic doll from sometime in the 1970s. Maybe they'd be consoled by the fact that I adored that doll? She was a Liddle Kiddle, a fat little pink fairy-like thing with a friendly face and a scent that claimed to be that of sweet peas. (You can see pictures of some of her non-pink siblings here on The Vintage Perfume Vault.) She's tied in with my fondness for both perfume and gardening, and she's one of the few childhood toys that I wish that I still owned.

I mentioned my Liddle Kiddle before, in this post about Tokyo Milk's Song In D Minor. But French Lime Blossom is a much more accurate rendition of the Kiddle combination of flowers and plastic. The plastic note has a strong New Barbie Doll vibe, too, but the flowers are wrong for Barbie, who in my imagination smells of a plasticked version of Shalimar. And in contrast to Barbie, Kiddle is the rare doll that looks as if she enjoys her food--I can see her spending a good deal of her garden leisure time eating honey.

Speaking of honey, I read in at least one of the Basenotes reviews that French Lime Blossom has a beeswax base. I've been searching for the perfect beeswax perfume (you may remember my long angsty love affair with Velvet Gardenia, and our chilly breakup), but, sadly, I don't actually get that note from this.

Jo Malone doesn't claim the beeswax--their notes list stops at lime blossom, bergamot, and tarragon. The Basenotes reviewers mention the beeswax, lime in addition to the lime blossom, iris, and "green". There's a soapy note, too, especially in the first hour or so; after that, it's submerged in florals and plastic. I'm curious to try the bath oil to see if the soap blooms as nicely for this fragrance as it does for White Jasmine & Mint.

So, where's the plastic coming from? The lime blossom? The beeswax? I can't translate it, and I don't see even one reviewer that mentions it--though several reviews do refer to lime-scented dishwashing liquid, so the synthetic vibe is obviously coming through for some.

Anyway, I like this one. I recommend sampling it, especially if you like the scent of toys.

Review Roundup: Fragrantica and MakeupAlley and Basenotes.

First Image: Wikimedia Commons.
Second Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: The Moratorium, Shopping, and My Brain

In February, I started the Perfume Moratorium. I was worried that my perfume experience was being consumed by the shopping end of the hobby--pricing, budgeting, filling and clearing online shopping carts. Dithering over buy decisions--is Heeley Cardinal redundant with Serge Noire? If I buy Din Dan will I have too many citrus perfumes? Would buying Tihota be grounds for having me committed? And budgeting decisions; I made the "one bottle per quarter" rule and promptly "borrowed" up to... is it just 2012?

I wanted to take the buying option off the table. I imagined six months of happy nibbling at the collection. I would wear neglected scents for days on end, and really get to know them. Empty vials would pile up as I worked through the sample backlog, savoring each scent without worrying about remembering them for a buying decision. My reviews would be uncontaminated with purchase dithering or budget whining. It would be a commerce-free creative scentopia!

Yeah. Not so much. I slacked off on the SOTD posts. I stopped reviewing perfume. My sample box went unopened for weeks at a time. I abandoned Basenotes. I kept reading perfume blogs, but mostly just to keep up with the bloggers' lives, rather than their perfumes. I stopped regularly wearing perfume.

And I didn't just stop perfume blogging. I slacked off on garden blogging, too. The fiction vignettes petered out. The random babbling about chocolate and fried things slowed down. My film festival posts were less extensive enthusiastic than last year. For a while, I wasn't doing much reading. My plant breeding and selection plans came to nothing.

Now, you could argue that all of that suggests a general lapse of creativity, maybe a low-key depression. That would make sense. But I don't think it's true. It feels as if perfume purchasing, perfume interest, and then all aspects of creativity, fell one after another like a series of dominoes.

And then the moratorium ended--I didn't buy much perfume, but the option to buy returned. And I started reading more. And posting more. And my interested in the garden perked up. And I started wearing more perfume. And I can feel the reviews bubbling up. All the dominoes popped back up, like Weebles.

My creative enthusiasms have always waxed and waned in bursts, triggered by nothing identifiable. For a few weeks or months I'm interested in everything, and then for a few more I'm interested in nothing at all. I don't like it, not one bit; I hate the "off" periods.

I demand an explanation. Or at least a theory.

So I Googled.

I found more than one article that assured me that shopping produces dopamine--and (bonus!) endorphins. Seeing something new and novel, finding a bargain, anticipating hunting down some new possession and dragging it home to the cave, feeds your reward center. That may be how shopping addiction happens. It's probably also behind the acquisition side of hoarding. Sadly for the shopping addicts and the hoarders, it's the anticipation that gives you the high--actually getting the item back to the cave does you no good at all.

Have I mentioned that I think that I have ADHD? Have I mentioned that ADHD is said to be a defect in the brain's reward center? And I've definitely mentioned that I have hoarder genes. I think that it's not entirely whacky to theorize that my brain might be particularly sensitive to dopamine levels.

And, of course, dopamine and endorphins are also associated with creativity.

So... you see the puzzle pieces of the theory? By declaring the moratorium, did I cut myself off from a highly effective method of self-medication? When I browse through LuckyScent et al with at least the possibility of making a purchase, does that feed my brain things that it needs?

Wait. Wait a minute. I just said this. I just said this. Five posts ago, I said "I have a hoarder id, and sometimes I need to feed it..."

That post and this post are saying the same thing, aren't they? Sure, that one was about bribing my brain so that it doesn't turn me into a hoarder, and this one is about feeding it for creativity, but it's the same food, and the same howling brain, isn't it?

Huh.

First Image: By Debbie Mc. Wikimedia Commons.
Second Image: By Quatar&Me. Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: Lazy Sundays and Zombies

Damn it, Valentine, you never plan ahead, you never take the long view, I mean here it is Monday and I'm already thinking of Wednesday.
It is Monday, right?
Earl Basset, Tremors

I slacked off on the decluttering today. And I didn't bake any squash or do any laundry or any cleaning or gardening. And I'm only 250 words into NaNoWriMo for the day, at ten o'clock at night.

I have a zillion things that I want to do. NaNoWriMo. Decluttering. Planting a whole lot of garlic and potato onions and tulips and daffodils and a small number of medium expensive lily bulbs. Cleaning up the portion of the Farm that some cat has recently claimed as its litter box and putting bird netting over it to prevent recurrences. Reading another 23 books to make the 100+. Buying Christmas presents.

I'm not so much doing them. Well, writing this counts as NaNoWriMo, but mostly I'm just sitting here staring blankly at The Walking Dead. The Walking Dead isn't a happy show. You might have guessed that from the title. Most of humanity is dead and most of the rest wants to eat you. Whee!

And I'm enjoying it. A while ago, while reading Flood by Stephen Baxter, Himself commented on the way that certain works of fiction can make you feel better about real life, because real life at least isn't as bad as that. The same apparently goes for The Walking Dead. Also, as zombie disasters go, it's a lot more fun than 28 Days Later. The cast of characters that survives for more than twenty minutes is a good deal larger, and there's a little bit of soap-opera-style bedhopping.  When people have to kill their friends because said friends have been infected by zombies, they get a little more time to think about it. What more could you want?

But it's not nearly as much fun as Night of the Comet, one of my favorite movies. A friend once asked for clarification on that point, I suspect hoping for reassurance that I meant one of my favorite junk movies or eighties teen movies or some other category that would make my disastrous taste lapse smaller. Nope. One of my favorites, without disclaimers.

Have you ever seen it? Two teenage girls survive a comet shower that turns most of the rest of the world into zombies. Then they go shopping. "Daddy would've gotten us Uzis" is one of the classic lines. How could you not love that? Or this photo?

All righty, I'm off to watch more zombies.

Image: By Marteen64. Wikimedia Commons.

Perfume: Pacifica Tuscan Blood Orange Body Wash

The quick conclusion: The body wash is the strawberry version, not the sweet-orange version. Dang.

The background: Pacifica scented products don't necessarily have a consistent scent across the products. The solid perfume may be different from the spray perfume, or the candle, or the hand cream, or the body wash. Since I love Tuscan Blood Orange, I wanted to post a quick post detailing what I know about its various forms.

I love the Tuscan Blood Orange solid perfume--it's a nice sweet orange with just enough edge to keep it from being entirely candy-sweet. The soap is essentially the same, maybe a bit sweeter, but not enough to matter. The spray perfume, on the other hand, is not only candy-sweet, but has almost no orange--it's all berries. (See Ajent Orange's review over at EauMG--she's the one that made me realize that it's not just that it's oversweet, but is in fact an entirely different fruit.) The candle is pretty much just like the solid perfume, at least, when you sniff the wax directly--I have yet to light it, and in fact I think I decluttered it when I realized that I just don't use candles.

I just bought the body wash yesterday, quite forgetting that there was any risk factor, and when settled into a fresh bubble bath to use it last night...berries. Bleah. A truthful bottle would have been pink, with little cherub faces on it. Bleah.

Winter and hand lotion time is coming; if I try that form, I'll update.

Image: By David Monniaux. Wikimedia Commons.

Reading: 100+ status, and a request for suggestions

Remember the 100+ Reading Challenge? I beat last year!

OK, technically I just know that I'm going to beat last year. Last year I had read seventy-seven books by Boxing Day and then stopped; this year I'm going to finish book seventy-seven sometime this weekend.

I walked through the lists from this year and last year, just for entertainment. I'm disappointed that I haven't branched out more from my usual murder mystery focus--last year I read fifty-three murder mysteries (or books that I found on the murder mystery shelf at the used bookstore, whether or not they actually had a murder) and this year it looks like about fifty as well, so far.

My other patterns remain more or less the same across the two years. I re-read a lot of Agatha Christie and Barbara Michaels. I hunt down new authors with long lists of books--Susan Conant last year, Margaraet Maron this year--and then sell their books as soon as I'm done, because apparently I'm not really all that captivated. I try the occasional book that somebody calls literary fiction--A Gate at the Stairs last year, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand this year--and then abandon the genre again.

This year I did try a little fantasy (Game of Thrones) and a little science fiction (Flood), but neither pulled me out of my usual reading comfort zone. I dabbled among all those children's books that I keep meaning to re-read, but didn't read them. It's possible that the challenge discourages me from reading children's books, because their shortness makes them feel like cheating, but I don't want to waste reading time on anything that I don't want to score.

Similarly, as Christmas approaches, I'm tempted to re-read The Lord Of The Rings, the way that I always used to over Christmas vacation, but knowing that those books will take me a while to read, and that I won't be willing to skip ahead because that would make the book uncountable, I'm resisting the temptation.

I'll probably sign up for this challenge, or another similar one, next year, but I think that I should add some more goals.

More literary fiction? Meh. I seem to have a prejudice against literary fiction, mainly because some of the people who read it like to speak sneeringly of "genre" fiction, as if a good author can't be good when writing a genre work. ("Those characters are too three-dimensional for a murder mystery! Flattten 'em! Flatten 'em now!") I realize that I'm being prejudiced based on annoyance at someone else's prejudice. I'll work on it.

More children's books? I've always loved children's books, and no doubt hundreds of good ones have been written since I was a child. And it's silly to worry about "cheating". Then again, I find myself thinking of Judith Martin saying that toys invented since a person was a child are "charmless" to that person, and wondering if the same might be true of children's books.

More science fiction? Nah. I have great respect for science fiction, but it's been a long time since I actually enjoyed it. In book form, at least--I do enjoy it in movies and on TV.

Classics? My grade and high schools were leery of anything longer than The Scarlet Letter and a little bit of Mark Twain. When I look at the Random House Modern Library list of 100 best novels, I see that I've read...eight of the board's list and nineteen of the reader's list. That leaves a lot to try. Sadly, I find that I don't feel a great deal of excitement about trying them.

Maybe I should search for a more rebellious or quirky list--the best novels written by women, perhaps, or the best children's books. Googling for list of "best books" by or for women, though, also leaves me cold--there's an uncomfortable leaning toward the heartwarming, which I assume comes from the selection process rather than being an inherent characteristic of women's writings.

But I like the general idea of reading more non-genre books by female authors. (Or, for that matter, really good genre books by female authors, that I may not have heard of.) Any suggestions?

Image: By Nathan Williams. Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: Decluttering and taking candy away from my id

So, we did some decluttering today. Mainly, we dug into the bookshelves and ended up with stacks and stacks of books to sell to the used bookstore--I'd quickly estimate a couple of hundred. Added to that is a foot-high stack of old Threads magazines to give away, if I can persuade someone to value them as much as I used to. The same for several dozen issues of Fine Gardening, though those are just going to spend an afternoon at the foot of the driveway with a Free sign, and will end up in paper recycling if no one takes them. There's also a boxful of assorted magazines not worth trying to find a home for; they're going straight into paper recycling as soon as I work up the energy to go outdoors.

That's after several boxes of clothes that went to the Good Will a week or three ago. Oh, and a large armchair donated to an organization that had a place to use it.

In the garage are two bins of assorted cables and power cords, and at least one more box of books, and two or three boxes of stuff that we intended for a garage sale but might just give away, now that we're past garage sale weather. In other words, stuff is leaving.

But I'm still not satisfied. I want to get the whole house down to a neat, sparse, minimalist level Right Now This Very Minute If Not Sooner Please! And then I want to be done. I need to accept the reality that it doesn't work that way. Two of the decluttering lessons that I never quite seem to absorb are (1) if it took decades to acquire, you can't get rid of it in a day and (2) decluttered never stays decluttered. The only way to keep a house in reliably good shape is to keep stuff flowing out the door, every single day, or at least every single week.

I also continue to deny facts about myself and my Stuff habits. For example, I buy books like magazines. Oh, not all the time, but there are times, especially when I'm traveling and have no access to a library, that I buy a book because I need want something to play with and cheer me up right now. And then I deny that this is what I've done, because it seems like such an unforgivably wasteful thing to do.

If I go all logical, I can tell myself that it's not that bad. A softback book often costs less than going to a movie (and having a Coke and popcorn), and it generally provides more than two hours' worth of entertainment. If I look for more examples in the travelling context where many of these books are purchased, the book is often cheaper than even one drink from Room Service.

What I need to accept is that it's entirely possible for me to buy even a cooking or sewing or gardening book (reference books that I'd normally expect to keep permanently), play with it for a few hours, and then lose interest in it within the month. At which point I should give or sell it away rather than letting it sit around gathering dust in the hope that I'll get my money's worth out of it. I already got my money's worth, when it made me happy on a stressful trip. There's no point in trying to make it work overtime.

I may have mentioned that, years ago, I used to do the same thing with Playmobils. You know Playmobils? Those happy friendly little dolls and all the places and things that you can buy for them? Some of them are oddly frightening places and things, for a children's toy. I'm used to kids playing with guns and monsters, but an ambulance complete with a prostrate (but still smiling) Playmobil child on a stretcher, complete with an IV? Meep.

Anyway, I love Playmobils, and I most love unpacking them and putting all the little pieces together. Once that's done, much of the charm is gone. Years ago, after a bad day at work, I'd sometimes drive to the hobby shop and buy a smallish Playmobil toy, take it home, unwrap and assemble it, and pose it on a shelf somewhere. And then ignore it for the subsequent decade. I finally gave them all away (Didn't I? Is there still a bookboxfull somewhere?), but it's relatively recently that I realized that those Playmobils earned their keep in the first day of ownership, and there was no logical reason to hang on to them rather than passing them on to someone who would proceed to pass them on to small children. To me, a Playmobil is like a cocktail, only cheaper; it improves my mood for an hour, and then it's used up.

Now, I'm not writing this post to advocate the purchase of durable or semi-durable goods, only to treat them as extremely temporary entertainments. But I think that it is important for me to acknowledge it when, despite good intentions, I do exactly that. One thing worse than a disposable culture is a disposable culture that refuses to dispose.

As I've said many times on this blog, I have hoarder genes. I have a hoarder id, and sometimes I need to feed it books with pretty pictures, or brightly colored socks, or that Playmobil desert kit with the vulture (Always wanted that one! Why haven't I bought it?), or a bottle of perfume that was less than carefully considered. If I don't give it a snack now and then, it's likely to lock the ego in the closet and leave the superego whining ineffectually in the middle of the set of Hoarders.

Or something. You see what I mean? My strategy, unstated until now, is apparently to feed the id, wait until it's looking the other way, then box up its toys and send them to charity. It's not the most efficient strategy, but it seems to keep things under control.

Picture of Playmobil hot dog vendor: Wikimedia Commons.