Lists & Indices

Q: Do you need an author website?
A: You betcha.

Awesome Author Site Tip #1: Yes, you should have a website. You probably don’t need convincing on this point, but I’m going to state three reasons why you need an author website.

They may not be the reasons you think: [click to read more...]

I picked up this suggestion from a multi-tasking friend yesterday:

Don’t make a to-do list in the morning. Make a “done” list in the evening. You will be amazed and gratified to learn that the day did not slip by unproductively.

For more of my thoughts on lists, see this item in my list of blockbusters.

Yesterday was Don’s 49th birthday, a matter, if you’ve been following, of great emotional charge. (I’m hoping he has 49 more.)

I was a bit disappointed in myself. I’d made the family’s favorite chocolate pie (doubling the amount of chocolate the recipe calls for), but when we tried to buy him this red leather chair, he decided to wait until it was on sale. I also tried to buy him books, but nothing leapt off the shelves for him. So I had nothing, nada, zip, except for pie and love.

“Write something,” he said. He knows I’m miserable when I slack off. “Write me something and post it on your blog.”

Well, okay. I set the timer, a trick I use when I can’t seem to focus, and wrote something about how he’d endured the inconvenience and irritation of wearing a Holter monitor over the weekend –11 sticky, itchy electrodes and a quarter mile of wire and a sinister black box (well, actually beige)
recording his heart sounds for 48 hours.

That’s jolly. Not.

While I wrote that, I had the Gin Blossoms going on iTunes and looked over at two stacks of CD jewel cases. I wrote:

I still like albums–vinyl ones, with 14-inch-square cardboard covers. There’s more canvas for the cover artists and the type is legible. Jewel cases are just–okay. They fracture too easily and someone thinks they need to be packaged hermetically enough to protect (us? or the CDs?) from anthrax.

On the other hand, the name jewel case suggests something valuable must be in there. And you can stack them so you can read the artist names and titles without tilting your head, which is warp-city with vinyl…

And that’s when I decided to brainstorm a
found-poem using the artist names and CD titles I could read from where I sat. A poem that employed at least a dozen of these, used this found language in nearly every line, and was at least 16 lines long. And I couldn’t change the grammatical contruction or break up any of the found bits (enjambments were permitted). Oh, and it needed to say something. That made sense, at least to the recipient.

So, here are the Official Final Draft Stats for "Jewel Case Chanson":

• Number of possible sources: 30.
• Number of found items used: 17.
• Final number of lines: 20.
• Number of lines with at least 1 found word: 19.
• Initial time for exercise: about 30 minutes.
• Total time for exercise, including tweaking: about 3 hours.

Extra credit: Can you identify all 17 references in Jewel
Case Chanson? Remember, either the artist name OR the CD title was used.

Number of degrees over the average temp. for this area on 12/24/03: 10
(Fahrenheit).

Number of hours after the usual time for their "last out" of
the night that our dogs were, in fact, let out on 12/24/03: 1

Number of people in our household who believed skunks hibernate in winter:
4.

Number of the top ten results of a Google search "skunks hibernate"
that corroborate this factoid: 4.

Number of the top ten results that state that skunks "are not true
hibernators" and sometimes wake up in warmer weather: 6.

Number of skunks in this part of New England who concur with the Google
results: at least 1.

Number of dogs skunked: 2.

Number of dogs who sprinted past the unwary homeowner and bolted upstairs
and rolled in our bed: 1.

Average number of baths had by our dogs in a typical month: 2.

Actual number of baths had by our dogs in December: 8.

Actual number of baths had by our dogs in the past two days: 8.

Number of bottles of peroxide needed to deskunkify two dogs: 3.

Product voted "best stuff on earth" by yours truly: "Smells
Begone."

This is likely to be the first in a series that will lie alongside”Maybe She Takes After…” (which so far stands as a collection of one, but nevermind).

Just as I keep finding evidence of my forebears in everything I do: I blog experience like Grandpa Paul, I proofread like mymother, I find much to be curious about in the natural world, as does my sister and as did my Grandma Trudy, I like to take long walks and look at buildings, like my architect father, I liked Latin/I married a Latin teacher; it goes on and on and I’ll probably write about every connection I can, eventually.

Anyway, just like this sort of influence, another exists. This sort are my written ancestors, rather than my cellular ones. There are certain books I find I must keep by me, even if I do not re-read them very often. These are the ones that made sucha strong impression on me the first time around that I need to see their faces (or at least their raggedy spines). Each one made the top of my head fly off in some fashion or another, and, collectively, they’ve become twisted up in the DNA of my writing practice and obsessions.The list (which only includes a scant half-dozen of what I stumbled upon before college) includes the following:

• The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe
• The Earliest English Poems
• Much Ado About Nothing
• Til We Have Faces
• The Norman Conquests
• The Golden Notebook

(I’ll explain why in future posts about each of these.)