Editor for Hire
I wish that I could hire myself as an editor, but I am much better at telling other people what to do. It’s hard to detach myself from my own writing. That being said, I have a lot of editing experience, and I’d love to help you get your book published.
A list of requests for my gentlemen callers
Dear gentlemen callers,
I have already established that I don’t want chocolate bouquets, but I think you deserve a more extensive list of acceptable tokens with which to express your feelings.
1. Mix CDs. Here is your chance to make me think of you every time I sing in my car. Selvi gave me a mix CD for my birthday, and I would marry her right now if I were a handsome Indian doctor.
2. Paper towels, organic milk, broccoli, hand soap, frozen pizzas, crackers. You know I hate going to the grocery store.
3. Gift certificates to fancy restaurants. This way I don’t actually have to eat with you to get a free meal.
4. Here is something I don’t want – diamonds. Yes, I’ve seen the commercials, and I found them really touching until I got on the meds that kicked most of my crying jags, but I don’t buy into diamond culture. Don’t get me wrong – I buy into gentlemen spending two months’ salary on me, just not on diamonds. The diamond cartel and its ad campaigns have been plugging away since the 1930s, telling us that their immortal product is a girl’s best friend. It’s not true. Diamonds are pretty, but they’re sold by scam artists. Edward Jay Epstein is one of the most eloquent voices of the anti-diamond movement (after me, of course). He wrote this piece in The Atlantic that delves into the trade.
The diamond invention is far more than a monopoly for fixing diamond prices; it is a mechanism for converting tiny crystals of carbon into universally recognized tokens of wealth, power, and romance. To achieve this goal, De Beers had to control demand as well as supply. Both women and men had to be made to perceive diamonds not as marketable precious stones but as an inseparable part of courtship and married life. To stabilize the market, De Beers had to endow these stones with a sentiment that would inhibit the public from ever reselling them. The illusion had to be created that diamonds were forever — “forever” in the sense that they should never be resold.
Lots of other folks have written on the subject. From Meghan O’Rourke’s “The Trouble with Engagement Rings“:
In 1919, De Beers experienced a drop in diamond sales that lasted for two decades. So in the 1930s it turned to the firm N.W. Ayer to devise a national advertising campaign—still relatively rare at the time—to promote its diamonds. Ayer convinced Hollywood actresses to wear diamond rings in public, and…encouraged fashion designers to discuss the new “trend” toward diamond rings. Between 1938 and 1941, diamond sales went up 55 percent.
Lastly, so you know that this post is just an excuse to sermonize, an interview with Janine Roberts, author of Glitter and Greed: The Secret World of the Diamond Cartel.
Eighty years ago, your great grandparents didn’t do this when they got married. They gave each other big wooden boxes and simple things like promise rings and hope chests. The allure of diamonds is part of a huge, century-long conspiracy by the diamond industry, namely giant De Beers, which controls stockpiles and sets the price of stones, which aren’t the rarest in nature, even though they’re the most expensive.
I am hoping that the word “conspiracy” will increase traffic to my blog.
5. Gentlemen callers, just give me the cash that you would have spent on a diamond.
6. I’m also fresh out of toilet paper.
Plastic in our oceans, plastic in our bodies
When will American industrialists realize that they have created a chemical Molotov cocktail? If people don’t care about the environment, they can at least care about their gay babies and their back fat.
“Except for the small amount that’s been incinerated—and it’s a very small amount—every bit of plastic ever made still exists,” [Captain Charles] Moore says, describing how the material’s molecular structure resists biodegradation. Instead, plastic crumbles into ever-tinier fragments as it’s exposed to sunlight and the elements. And none of these untold gazillions of fragments is disappearing anytime soon: Even when plastic is broken down to a single molecule, it remains too tough for biodegradation.
Lead in lipstick
I always knew there was a reason why I choose to look so frumpy. It turns out I am a scientist. National news outlets like CNN have been picking up this story today about the presence of unsafe doses of lead in popular lipsticks made by L’Oreal, Dior, and Cover Girl.
More than half of 33 brand-name lipsticks tested (61 percent) contained detectable levels of lead, with levels ranging from 0.03 to 0.65 parts per million (ppm). None of these lipsticks listed lead as an ingredient.
One-third of the tested lipsticks exceeded the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s 0.1 ppm limit for lead in candy – a standard established to protect children from directly ingesting lead. Lipstick products, like candy, are directly ingested into the body. Nevertheless, the FDA has not set a limit for lead in lipstick, which fits with the disturbing absence of FDA regulatory oversight and enforcement capacity for the $50 billion personal care products industry.
Research money is finally going to the study of harsh chemicals in cosmetics, and I couldn’t be happier about it, even though the published findings will continue to be scary. Women (and the men and babies that are kissed and snuggled regularly by women) need to demand that the FDA regulates the chemical content of cosmetics. When harsh cosmetics aren’t swallowed or absorbed directly into the skin, they are washed into our water supply where they cause untold environmental damage.
Here is a great local website – environmentalhealthnews.org – that chronicles the problems in more depth.
Here is a website that will tell you which beauty products are safe and which are not: Skin Deep
How to get over writer’s block
I use that headline strategically so all the blocked writers out there will find my page when they are Googling “writer’s block.” If you are a writer who has never Googled “writer’s block,” then you are also a liar, like the Don Juans who say they have never looked up sex tips online, or the promiscuous women who say they have never Googled “itchy vagina.”
I am not 100% confident that I am actually over my writer’s block, but here is how I’ve been psyching myself up to work on the novel again.
1. I finally came to grips with the fact that books do not get written in my sleep. I actually have dreams now where I am revising Chapter Two, and I am doing an awesome job. This is like when Darren dreams that he has designed a new CSS layout for WordPress, and he wakes up all excited. Don’t count on doing your best work while you’re sleeping. Now you are freed up to focus on the daytime, which brings me to number two.
2. Write in the morning instead of “after lunch,” “after this nap,” “after these four glasses of wine,” or “after I finish this inspirational book about writing.” Even if you don’t consider yourself a morning person, I think it’s great for morale to write first thing after breakfast. You feel like you accomplished your day’s literary work, and then the pressure is off so you are more likely to keep writing later in the day, guilt-free. Your boss will understand that you have to show up a few hours late to the office.
3. Don’t kill your morning blogging about writer’s block when you should be concentrating on conquering it.
4. Opening and closing the refrigerator does not a novel write.
5. Remember that you are not lazy; you are a tortured artist. Unless the converse works better for your productivity, in which case stop being so pretentious and get to work. I personally go back and forth. I either can’t write because I’m so complicated and angstful, and that makes me watch nature documentaries about amphibious monkeys in the middle of the afternoon, or I can’t write because I’m such an undisciplined, lousy, untalented person, and those swimming monkeys are irresistible to my lower animal brain. Maybe there should be something in between these extremes, like “I’m okay, you’re okay, let’s write a book.”
6. Remember that other people consider you a writer if you’re sitting at your computer typing out words. That’s all it takes. Don’t you want other people to think you’re a writer? Don’t you care what other people think of you?
7. Write in public. Find an anonymous coffee shop and write there. It is important to get out of your house and turn your laptop monitor towards other people so you will be shamed out of looking at the usual websites and you will focus instead on your Word document. Being away from the neighborhood of your kitchen, couch, and bed – the devil’s playground – is worth the $2 you will have to pay for a beverage. You will also feel like you are part of a community. Just don’t be one of those annoying coffee shop writers who is always looking around the room for inspiration so other customers can’t help but fear they’re being written into someone’s bad poetry.
8. When I’m especially blocked, I like to think about all the olden-timey writers who had to work by candlelight and who didn’t have indoor plumbing and who ran the risk of their only manuscript getting burned in a house fire and who didn’t have the incentive of a million dollar, three-book deal from Random House to keep them going. They also lacked our luxurious life spans, so we have no excuse to be less prolific than them. No excuse. Did Chaucer take breaks to pluck his eyebrows? No, and neither will you.
9. You are going to die one day and leave nothing but bones, unless you keep writing and then you will leave bones and a jump drive.
Sacagawea is your new best friend
The City of Charlottesville hosts a statue at the intersection of McIntire Road and West Main Street that has some forward-minded people seeing red (pun intended). The controversial statue (Charles Keck, 1919) depicts Lewis and Clark standing heroically over a cringing, subservient Sacagawea, the Shoshone woman who guided the explorers to the Pacific Coast and back at the beginning of the 19th Century. The inscription on the statue reads:
MERIWETHER LEWIS/1774-1809/WILLIAM CLARK/1770-1838/BOLD AND FARSEEING PATHFINDERS/WHO CARRIED THE FLAG OF THE/YOUNG REPUBLIC TO THE WESTERN/OCEAN AND REVEALED AN UNKNOWN/EMPIRE TO THE USES OF MANKIND
A TERRITORY OF 385,000 SQUARE MILES WAS ADDED TO THE/COUNTRY BY THE EFFORTS OF THESE MEN; AN AREA LARGER/THAN THE THEN EXISTING SIZE OF THE UNITED STATES
With Columbus Day approaching, Miss Representation USA aka Jennifer is inviting women, friends of women, Native Americans, friends of Native Americans, and seekers of truth-telling rocks to protest the Lewis & Clark statue’s inaccurate depiction of Sacagawea. Here are the upcoming “Operation Sacagawea Never Cowered” events that you are encouraged to attend:
TUESDAY, Oct. 2
Miss Rep & friends at petition table by City Hall from 12-2 p.m.
WEDNESDAY, Oct. 3
Miss Rep & friends at petition table near West Main Market from 12-2 p.m.
THURSDAY, Oct. 4
Miss Rep & friends at petition table Center Place/fountain at downtown mall from 12-2 p.m.
FRIDAY, Oct. 5
Go see Natsu Saito speak at UVA Art Museum at 5:30 p.m. (FREE) and then see The Canary Effect at Vinegar Hill at 9 p.m. as part of the Columbus: Myth and the American Dream Revisited event.
MONDAY, Oct. 8
Columbus Day Observed. Hide the Statue! Intersection of Ridge-McIntire & West Main & Water from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m.
If all goes according to plan in C-Ville, for her next activist feat Jennifer may drape the White House in fabric like Christo, or put a sun visor on planet Earth to protest global warming. There will be no stopping her after her first success. Be smart and get in early. The Jennifer train is leaving the station and the world will be a better place when she is done blowing her horn. And because it’s Jennifer we’re talking about, that train metaphor will remind her of farting.
For more info, contact Jennifer at the hotline: (434) 227-6521
Fake nail etiquette
When you are at a lovely dinner party, do not interject during dessert – “Oh shit my pinkie nail just popped off.” I didn’t know this would be such a big deal, but Selvi explained to me that people still have a hard time distinguishing acrylic nails from real nails. They don’t want any kind of fingernails getting mixed up with their food. This reminded me of a story my mom told me once about a hair salad, but I’m going to save that for a book. Anyway, after my big announcement about my pinkie nail, I sheepishly went to the bathroom to recover from the faux pas, and somehow I lost track of the nail after I placed it on the counter beside the sink. These bits of French-manicured plastic are really light. A small gust of wind (ahem) could have blown my nail to the floor. I searched around for a while, but then I started missing Selvi, who I could hear telling a story about the tallest building in the world (or maybe just in Canada), so I returned to the table. Our dinner hostess was not just satisfied waiting on us hand and foot with extraordinarily good food and five kinds of dessert, she also insisted we take some food home with us. She is the kind of selfless hostess who will only be happy if you empty the contents of her fridge into shopping bags and a cooler on your way out the door. So we said goodbye, my pocketbook stuffed with Texas chews, and then Selvi and I walked to her house. On the way I felt an irritant in the bottom of my sandal. I reached down and pulled out my pinkie nail.
Tada! Story comes full circle. The most important part of this story is that Darren and I leave for New York City and Montreal today. If you happen to be in either of those places, or even on the railroad route, give me a call. We can wave at you from the train while we sip mimosas and read great literature.
Extracurricular Activities
For most of my life I have avoided clubs and extracurricular activities. I was always more comfortable hanging out by myself or with one other person than as part of a group. I also hated being committed to stuff, because I like having the flexibility of taking a nap if I need a nap. When I was a kid I guess I played on a few sports teams. I was even on swim team for a time in 5th grade, but mostly for the Rice Krispy Treats and single serving Twizzlers that the concession stand sold at Saturday meets. Then my friend Caroline and I started skipping swim practice. Instead of doing laps, we’d walk around town hiding from our parents and neighbors before dousing our hair and our bathing suits in the YMCA locker room sinks. But for many years I didn’t participate in any after-school activities. In college a few of my friends started a club called SEED – The Society for Eastern European Decadence. We sat around and talked about The Unbearable Lightness of Being and drank wine spritzers, always a little tongue-in-cheek (I hope), but the club dissolved the night that we invited the boys to play Truth or Dare and some shirts came off. Then I just retired altogether from group activities. Even holding a job was hard for me. It was always too much like Office Club or The Secretarys’ Alliance. However for the past few months I have been involved in a writing group that I LOVE. I always felt too introverted and embarrassed to join one of these, but now I find myself interrupting the other members to say what I think of an original story. And it helps me open up that we typically have wine and cookies at our meetings. This workshop group combines my great loves – words and sweets. And it just doesn’t bother me anymore that being in a club is totally gay.
So even if you think you are incorrigibly shy or socially awkward or if you just don’t like people, I think there is a group out there for you. Dominic, you can find a club made up of people who like to listen to obscure music alone for hours, and then put their playlists on the internet. Willis, you can join a gang of people who like to giggle at America’s Funniest Home Videos. Jennifer, you already have too many extracurricular activities. And Darren has joined a club of computer nerds who like to play soccer and go to happy hour at French restaurants. There is a community for everyone. So get off your computer, get on Craigslist, and start your own club. You can even have a clubhouse and a secret password. You can even make t-shirts and make fun of non-members. You can even give out cheap trophies for attendance and hang out at Pizza Hut on Saturday afternoons.
Proper Chainsawing Attire
This afternoon my little brother Stephen got mad at me because I made him put on shoes when he chainsawed a tree that had fallen across the road. He was walking toward the tree shirtless, barefoot, with a chainsaw in one hand and a can of gas in the other. I said, “No way. Turn around. Put some boots on.” I mean, my parents have broken-down cars in their driveway and a stuffed, roadkill fox in their living room, but I draw the line at barefoot chainsawing.