Category: nonfiction

I had plans to introduce a book today, but … maybe next week. Some books have to be read a few pages at a time, and this is one. Also, today I have a profound envy of everyone who doesn’t have chronic fatigue. Why this week? Because the energy other people spend on planning and adjusting plans and making their daily lives work is energy I do not have. More than once recently I’ve had to skip events I wanted to attend or cancel dinner parties because someone had to check something with me and changed this or that and, in spending energy in these small discussions… I ran out of spoons.

I do that a lot right now. I know the triggers and I’m handling everything almost well enough. The trick is in the ‘almost.’ Even typing this is exhausting. Several friends have given me advice, because they know it will help. The thing is, I’ve had chronic fatigue for around 40 years. At this point, advice does not help. I have a list of things that must be done… these things help. And some friends listen, but most, right now, don’t. So… bed.

The moral of this week’s very short post is, “If you know anyone who handles chronic fatigue, when they say they’re not dealing, keep things simple.”

Next week, however, I should have some comments on a book where I feel seen. Very, very seen.

Once again, this week got away from me. Here’s a piece from 2018.

I read an article on Salon a few years ago: “Is Michael Pollan a Sexist Pig?” by a writer named Emily Matchar. The title is, of course, very tongue in cheek; the article is about the omnivore/ locavore/ femivore movements, and about the myths we make up about the past. In this case, the past in question is the good ol’ days of cookery from the writers’ childhoods, and how much better everything was in the days before feminism led us to processed food.

Now, all things being equal I like to make my food from scratch, I love the farmer’s market, I do read labels, and I attempt not to buy things that I can make myself. But I do these things because I’d just as soon know what I’m eating, because I have family members with nasty allergies. I don’t do them as a political statement. I’m fortunate that I can afford to buy organic at least some of the time, that I have the time and the leisure to cook the way I prefer to. And oh yeah: I like to cook. Not everyone does. Not everyone likes to eat, for that matter. There are people who regard food as fuel, something they have to be prodded to remember. (I know: bizarre, right?)

Full disclosure: for a potluck at the time I made a chocolate tart with gingersnap crust, and a jam tart, and (possibly) some truffles made with leftover ganache. Because I am insane, but also because doing this stuff is fun. For me. As it is for many people in the “femivore” movement, which started out about making food (or raising chickens, or gardening or baking bread) as craft or art. But an awful lot of the omnivore/locavore/femivore rhetoric is distinctly anti-Feminist (seriously, go read the article, particularly the quotes from the like of Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Pollan, and Marguerite Manteau-Rao). In looking for a more “authentic” diet are these writers valorizing a time that never was?

Look at many of the cookbooks from the 30s, 40s, and 50s (never mind the 60s, when I, and many of the writers, were kids) and they’re full of short-cuts: use canned soup, top your casserole with deep-fried onion strings, use prepared ketchup or mayonnaise or Jell-O™ or corn flakes or instant oats. Use instant pudding. Use frozen spinach (or, even scarier, canned spinach. Have you ever had canned spinach? It’s like eating soggy green tissues). A decade before Betty Friedan put pen to paper to discuss the feminine mystique, ads in womens’ magazines touted wash-day miracles and labor-saving devices and wonderful, wonderful processed food. Because doing this stuff wasn’t a creative outlet. It was work.

There used to be a rhyme that outlined a woman’s work week: Monday (when you were rested up from your day of rest and going to church on Sunday) was laundry day. Laundry was a brutal task, involving boiling and stirring or wringing and hanging of an entire household’s clothes and linens. Tuesday was ironing day (yes, you put the iron on the stove to heat it, or on the coals of your fire if you didn’t have a stove, and yes, those irons were made of iron and weighed a young ton). Wednesday: sewing day, making your own clothes and clothes for your family, repairing, darning, stitching new sheets (yes, women hemmed and darned their sheets). Thursday: marketing, getting all the things that you couldn’t make, to last you a week. Friday: cleaning. Scrubbing on your hands and knees, polishing, beating rugs, dusting, scouring. Finally, Saturday, baking–for the week. All those pies and cake and breads–which explains a lot of recipes using “stale bread,” since by the end of the week whatever bread was left was likely to be rock-hard. And Sunday, like every day, three times a day: feed the family.

Whatever the rhetoric of feminism, women didn’t want frozen food, store-bought bread, and labor-saving devices because feminism told them they were being oppressed. They wanted these things because their work was really, really difficult and time consuming and exhausting. If these things freed some women up to do other things–run Hewlett Packard or become Secretary of State or write science fiction, that wasn’t the point. The point was to get out from under all that backbreaking, repetitive work.

Valorization of a better, simpler, more wholesome time drives me nuts. Because it’s fantasy. I love the gorgeous, candy-colored rendition of small-town turn of the last century Iowa in The Music Man, but I don’t confuse that with real life, which included diptheria, weevil-ly flour, bedbugs, and food that often teetered on the edge of spoiled. Taking on some of the tasks of yesterday, while using some of the tools of today to avoid the nastier work, and disdaining people who cannot or don’t want to do the same, is a mug’s game. It makes it all about aesthetics, when what most people 100 years ago, and many people today, are worrying about is survival.

Eat what you love, eat what is healthy, eat what you can afford and what you feel good about. Cook or eat out or call for a pizza. Grow tomatoes, spin flax, make poetry or pottery or raise llamas for the wool. It’s all good. But don’t blame Betty Friedan if you don’t like what’s for dinner.

I suspect that some of the stuff I experience everyday is about to go into my fiction. A part of this is intentional: how can I not use the hateful things people send my way because I’m Jewish and use them as triggers for vampire attacks? What vampire wouldn’t react to a really wrong insult that tells them who and what they are and gets it entirely wrong? What vampire wouldn’t get bloodlust and rage and remember how much, how very much they will always hate Bram Stoker?

And then there is the “If you don’t think like me, you do not belong.” This is hidden under other words, but it’s the useful subtext. And it explains why we do not clearly identity the vampires and werewolves in our midst, because why would they self-identity when we’ve already told them they don’t belong if we do?

The concept behind this is not new at all. It’s much easier to address the hate we experience everyday when we have vampires and werewolves and fae and other beings to act as a channel.

And that’s all I have to say this week, because this week is one of those weeks when I have a solid amount of despite targeted at me and, if I were a vampire, I would be both triggered and well-fed.

Fortunately, I am not a vampire. Why fortunately? I’m so glad you asked.

Have you ever wondered how a Jewish vampire would explain to a rabbi that they live on blood?

I’m traveling this week, so here’s something from 2020…

So there I was, working on a short story that took over my brain, right when I ought to be working on the book that took over my brain when I was supposed to be working on the new Sarah Tolerance book. (For those following along at home: 1) Sarah Tolerance Book < 2) Urban Fantasy Thing < 3) Short Story. This is why Madeleine cannot have nice things.)

So I want to finish this story. When its finished I can go back to #2, so I can return to #1. In aid of these goals, I’ve been writing on the train home from work. Because that means I’m writing by hand, it also means there are gaps. There are also gaps where I cannot quite figure out how to get from point A to point B (trust me, this is part of my process. Assuming I have a process). This weekend I’ve been trying to fill up the gaps, knit the thing together so I can start doing the really important stuff of going through and making all the words stack up into story order. I’ve actually written the last scene of the story–yea, even the last sentence–yet I still have this vertiginous feeling that the ending is constantly receding into the distance, as if it were trying to enact one of Xeno’s paradoxes (the one where you keep halving the distance between you and your objective, and therefore never quite reach the objective itself).

In my imagination, the ending just keeps getting up from its seat, taking ten steps back, and sitting down again. And there am I, adding more and more words to get the middle part done, and watching the ending of my story recede from sight. In my imagination, my story is taunting me each time it gets up and moves away from me. Malicious story: it’s not a happy thing to imagine.

Fortunately, I’ve been here before. At some point in almost every piece of fiction I’ve ever written, it seems the book will never end, that bits will keep appending themselves in different places, and that the whole concern will simply fall over from its sheer ungainly largeness and lie on the metaphorical floor like a dead thing.

Part of writing (or any creative process) is persevering even when every iota of your diminishing brainpower is insisting that you should have listened to your Uncle Larry and taken up air conditioning repair. Go forth and persevere.

Or at least my writing.

In the mid 1990s I worked for three years as an editor at Acclaim Comics. It was a fun job, and a frustrating job, and I loved it–I had been a comic book reader as a kid, my brother had been working as a letterer for over a decade, so I had some prior exposure to the world of comics. It all seemed to be fated… until Acclaim Comics’ parent company (which had, um, not been managed well) went under and took the comic company out as well. So I found myself unemployed, and took up La Vie Boheme Freelance. Since I had two young kids, this actually worked out pretty well.

One of the weekly routines I fell into was lunching with a bunch of friends who also worked in publishing/comics on Wednesdays at the Malibu Diner on 23rd Street (down the block from a good comic book shop, so that after lunch people could stroll down and pick up that week’s new comics). One of the Malibuvians (as we styled ourselves) was Keith DeCandido, who was then the editor for a line of Marvel Comics tie-in novels. And I was a freelancer, looking for work. When I said as much at lunch one day, Keith asked me who my favorite Marvel character was. “Daredevil,” I said without hesitation. Alas, he had a Daredevil novel in the pipes, but he promised to remember me for the next time Daredevil came up in the rotation. We finished our lunch. Life went on much as usual.

Until a couple of weeks later when he called me: the writer for his Daredevil novel had to drop out and how quickly could I get a detailed (like chapter-level, if not scene level) outline to him, and it had to be by the beginning of July (it was then mid-June). So I wrote a 30 page outline, detailed to the chapter and sometimes the scene level.

It was excruciating: I am, by nature, a semi-pantser: usually I write 20-40,000 words on a book and then I write an outline to tell me where I’m going to go from there. Sometimes the outline is as simple as four or five beats. Chapters? They’ll be in there somewhere. Scenes? Likewise. But Marvel wants what Marvel wants, and I wanted the gig. So I did it, turned it in. Keith called me back and said “Looks pretty good. I suspect they’re going to want this and this thrown in, but otherwise… start writing, and when the approval comes in I’ll tell you if there are any changes.

I started writing. I finished the book at the beginning of September, turned it in to Keith, and we got the approval of the outline two weeks later. Adjustments were made, Daredevil: The Cutting Edge was accepted, we all went along with our lives. That’s the cover featured above. (You will note there is neither a title for the book nor the author’s name… everyone was so in love with the art that they kind of forgot those essentials. Ah, well. My name made it to the spine.)

What did I learn from this? Well, I learned that I can write an 80,000 word book in two months. But what I really learned is something that still marks my writing. 

Daredevil, if superhero comics or TV or movies are not your jam, is a character who is blind. Stan Lee took the old cliche about a blind person’s other senses improving to compensate for the deficit and put it on steroids. As a kid Matt Murdock was hit by a truck hauling chemical waste through Manhattan; the accident took his sight, but somehow the chemical muck with which he was spattered augmented his senses. So every time Matt (who becomes Daredevil) walks into a room he can hear and smell, and taste, and feel everything that is going on around him. He knows where an adversary is by listening for a heartbeat–but also for the disturbances of the air through which the adversary is moving. He can tell what someone had for breakfast by the scent of eggs and ketchup on the guy’s breath, or on his tie. He has learned to sift through all the input of his heightened senses to get information that he can use, not just to navigate the world as a blind man, but to kick ass as a superhero.

What this meant for me as a writer was that I had to put in the sensory cues when Matt walked into a room or Daredevil confronted a villain. So for the two months I was writing the book, every time I walked into a room, or went around a corner, if I smelled or heard something, I found myself trying to parse it. Not just “that’s a smelly alleyway” but “cat urine, damp earth, brick dust, ammonia cleaning products.” Not just “noisy room” but which voices were dominant, and what the other sounds–an elevator moving behind the walls, traffic noise wafting up from the street–were. Tastes. Textures. Proprioception (very important when you’re a blind superhero fighting with others in a variety of settings).

Writing this book required that I confront, in a sense, my privilege as a sighted, and sight-centered person. And I’ve carried the lessons I learned with me since then. Perhaps it’s particularly important to me because a lot of the writing I’ve done since Daredevil takes place in a different time and place from our own. There’s nothing like smell, for example, for creating a place that is then: every hired carriage Sarah Tolerance gets into has its own, usually unpleasant, galaxy of smells. So does every large group of people, particularly in a time and place when daily or weekly bathing was the exception rather than the rule. Working on the Daredevil book reminded me that everyone has, not only a unique look, but a unique smell. That a voice is not just a tone or a timbre, but is shaped by a variety of factors including the speaker’s health and upbringing. That the surface of skin is composed, not just of the skin itself, but of the substances–sweat, oil, cosmetics, medicines–that may be on the skin, and their scents.

As an exercise, try writing a scene where the descriptors are all about sound and touch and taste and smell (and proprioception, if that seems a useful tool). It will feel awkward at first, especially in terms of describing a character physically. If Daredevil confronts a guy who is unkempt, maybe getting over a hangover, and trying to avoid giving some information about something he’s witnessed, he won’t be able to say whether the guy is blond or brunette, but he can judge his height and weight, smell the sour taste of stale alcohol on his clothes and his breath, and hear the heightened heartbeat that suggests he’s lying.

Try it. It’s just one more useful tool in a writer’s box.