Bo-Bo Knows Flotsam and Jetsam

Bo-Bo doesn't horde the flotsam and jetsam of life. No trinkets collecting dust, no clothes he hasn't worn in years, no crazy contraptions designed to help his hopeless fingers weave his hair into the French braid he never quite got the hang of. Maybe it's the whole being-a-dog thing.

I, on the other hand, collect more than I need of just about everything. Too many pages in the rough draft of my book, too many pounds on my bones, and too many products in my home. Talk about an embarrassment of riches. As someone prone to excesses, New Year's is always a dodgy time. Instead of resolutions I usually write manifestos (and if you know me personally at all, you know I'm not kidding). But 2009 will be different--one resolution instead of a dozen. I mean it! My 2009 manifesto clocks in at one, measly word: Reduce.*

Because I find that public humiliation is a good way to keep myself on the straight and narrow (in the inimitable words of Johnny Cash, "because you're mine, I walk the line"), I'm going to do an occasional post detailing the items I'm tossing, recycling, or bequeathing to the world in the form of charitable donations or gifts to people who will appreciate it more than me.

Now. Who wants a thing-a-ma-bob to help you French braid you hair?


FLOTSAM AND JETSAM...TAKE ONE!

• Number 1: 68 pages of other people's writing. Usually I file them away and keep them long after I've given them my two cents. No need given that I keep the electronic copies. Gone!
• Numbers 2-9: A veritable bonanza of expired medicines, creams, and prescription medicines. **
• Number 10: A 3-inch, thin metal rod with u-shaped pitchforks on either side. The best I can tell is it's from the center of a hair clip that's missing in action.
• Number 11: Stretched-out brown plastic hair tie.
• Number 12: Old plastic zippered pouch thing. No idea.
  

And that was just from the medicine cabinet. Oy! It's gonna be a long year...

* OK, yes. Reduce is shorthand for reducing pages during a second draft, pounds through healthier habits, and products in a room by room overhaul, but the way I figure it, even a three-for is progress. Baby steps, people. Baby steps!

** The expanded list:
2. Generic Ben Gay that expired in December...2006
3. expired tooth ache numbing "stuff"
4. expired canker cream (lovely)
5. sunblock that apparently stopped deflecting rays in 2006
6. expired cold and sinus medicine
7. expired decongestant (like that stuff doesn't make you feel loopy enough already)
8. expired prescription for penicillin from Mike's wisdom teeth extraction.
9. allergy itch cream my mother-in-law suggested I buy for the great mosquito attack of '05. The package was unopened...and expired.

Bo-Bo Knows Books Can Bite

I have officially shed blood for my book. This isn't some ain't-writing-
a-slog metaphorical blood--we're talking honest-to-god hemoglobin. There I was innocently re-reading with an eye toward the next draft when--bam! The fucker bit me.

In all fairness, this heinous attack may not have been entirely unprovoked. During a writing class last night, I might have comically eulogized my decision to demote one of my point of view characters. And while I'll admit I should have done it out of the book's earshot, I certainly gave Maura (said demoted character) a fair trial. But after spending two long nights deliberating until three in the morning, the evidence was clear--Maura had to go.

But Maura's a fickle bitch. I should know. I made her. So I guess her vindictive streak shouldn't exactly surprise me, but here in the real world, we get a little blindsided when figments of out imaginations go for blood. Inspiring sweat? Sure. Frustrating us to tears? you betcha! But characters leaping from the page and drawing blood? That's the realm of Stephen King's The Dark Half, isn't it?

Maybe not.

I want to take the high road, here--I really do. Particularly given I'm human and Maura's just paper and ink. But the bitch cut me, man! Right across the tip of my favorite finger! And messing with a writer's typing fingers? That ain't right, yo!

So Maura? Here's my bandaged salute. This shit is so on.

Bo-Bo Knows Whiplash

When I finished the rough draft of my novel, I expected to go out of my mind. Tears maybe? Dragging Bo to the beach so I could run off some energy? Bowling over Mike with the atomic force that comes from crashing through a lifetime spent telling myself I just don't finish what I start? Blinking at my computer screen as my brain came to the surreal realization that the fifth book was the charm?

I did feel joy, and I did celebrate. But there were two celebratory obstacles.

The first was the easy one. The end of the rough draft means the start of the revision. While embracing a forward-ho! approach did wonders for powering through this draft, it left quite the mess in its wake. Think of it like hosting a literary block party in your living room--all cocktails and music and fun--only to wake up with so much cleaning to do you have no idea where to start. Not to mention the gaping holes in the wall...

The second obstacle was harder.

On November 5, I learned that one of my closest friends has stage four pancreatic cancer. I heard the news the way a sister might take such news about her brother--hard. But when I started to shut down, I rallied myself. My friend is a brother-in-art who helped me embrace the pioneering spirit of creative living in a largely apathetic world. He believed I was a writer before I believed it myself. His enthusiasm for this novel was and is unconditional and constant. Shutting down was just about the best way to spit on everything he taught me. So I rallied. On November 7, I finished the draft. It was fucking done!

But with exhilaration came whiplash.

That first weekend, spikes of joy alternated with the flatline of loss. I finished the book with a stubborn insistence that putting it off was to dishonor all the ways my friend has supported my writing, but any joy I felt about reaching "the end" gave way, eventually, to guilt. A wise friend told me this guilt was natural, but I had to let it go. That life is too short to waste worrying. That I had to embrace joy when it comes.

People say life is a roller coaster--you're up then you're down, screaming and scared one minute and laughing like a loon the next. But there's got to be more to life that strapping yourself in and bracing for the loop-de-loops. We have more control than that. We have to. Life is more like a see saw--one minute you're riding high and the next you're on you're ass, but you have the power to stay on the ground or launch yourself back skyward. And no. I'm not quite on board with my life-as-see-saw metaphor, either, but you get what I'm saying about our hand in pushing ourselves up and away from the ground. What I'm trying to say anyway. Embrace joy when it comes? I did. I tried. I'm trying.

Bo-Bo Knows Hope

I didn't walk Bo on this this near-60 degree November morning; I bounced. I smiled so much, people smiled right back at me.

For the first time in my lifetime, the United States elected a president that gives me hope infectious enough it spread from my mind to swallow my heart. I know electing President Obama doesn't fix the many hurts of this country. I understand that electing President Obama means the work is just beginning. But I also understand that the prospect of the right kind of work beginning, finally, brings a national hope I've never known.

My morning walk takes me right along the ocean. The sea was calm today, lapping like a lake, and I couldn't help but feel like that was the earth itself taking a deep breath and saying we can, we will, we must.

Bo-Bo Knows to Vote Yes on 3

I admire people who rant tirelessly in support of the great issue of their lives and metabolize their sense of justice into activism. But as much as I would like to have a missionary's spunk, my heart beats to a less warlike rhythm. I see twelve sides --at a minimum--to every story. Choosing just one can be problematic.

On Tuesday, November 4, Massachusetts voters will have a chance to ban greyhound racing. A yes vote would make racing illegal as of January 2010.

Although the kindly and curious people who stop Bo and me in the street used to chat about Bo's top speed, these days they all ask me how I think they should vote on question 3. They're looking for a hell, yeah! A passionate cry! But what I tell them is this:

I think the tracks in Massachusetts are better than the horror shows that pass as racetracks in other countries, but I didn't like what I've seen given my experience with Bo. I'm voting yes.

Don't get me wrong: I understand that adopting one greyhound doesn't exactly make me an expert on this issue, so here are the links to the arguments from both sides:

YES--The argument for ending racing.
N0--The argument to keep it going.

That said, here are my Bo-infused reasons for voting yes on 3:

1. Scrawny Bo--When we adopted Bo, he weighed ten pounds less than his current svelte--but healthy--weight (the photo above shows Bo-Bo's fresh-from-the-track, xylophone ribs).

2. Wormy Bo--Bo came to us with a pooper full of worms.

3. Abandoned Bo--We adopted Bo through the Wonder Dogs adoption program at Wonderland Dog Park. The staff was very responsive to our requests for information, the program pays to spay and neuter adoptive animals, and the adoption director allowed us to visit the kennel to choose our Bo. They even helped us identify the dogs that were gentle enough I wouldn't have to worry about him around friends and family--particularly my then-3-year-old nephew Ryan. We narrowed the choice to an as-yet un-spayed female dog and the dog-who-would-be-Bo. When we couldn't decide, the program organizer had a solution: take the neutered dog for the weekend and see how it went. He sent us home with Bo, his papers, and instructions to call if we had a problem. No one from Wonder Dogs ever called to see how we were managing.

4. Nameless Bo--Bo's kennel name was Ricky, but he never once responded to it, yet he started responding to to "Bo" and "Bo-Bo" after living with us a week.


5. Stretchy Bo--At our house, Bo spends most of his day sprawled out to his full length across one of three of his ginormous pillows. In his more spaztastic moments, Bo will co-opt one of his many squeaky toys for a rousing game of pounce-and-toss. In the kennel, Bo lived in a crate lined with shredded newspaper. Though he could stand and lay down, a full sprawl was out of the question. He had no toys.

6. Skittish Bo--Bo shies away from strangers holding canes, crutches, surfboards, clipboards, or balloons. When I took him to a fun run at Wonderland last spring, he shook. I know that the shaking was probably about being in a building with hundreds of people around him at once, but the image of him with his head drooped in his alma mater is one I can't get out of my mind. During his race, Bo clocked in at 27 miles per hour out of the gate, but by the time he reached me, he had slowed to a trot and started whimpering. His eyes had the same haunted look he gets when I'm getting ready to leave. Hey, I know that there isn't exactly a one-to-one relationship between what it looks like a dog might be thinking and what he's actually thinking. But crying is crying.

The thrust of a commercial being aired by the opposition to question 3 focuses on the 1,000 Massachusetts residents who will lose their jobs if racing is banned. But if question 3 passes, these employees will have more than a year to choose an alternative path. Greyhounds never had the luxury of choice. On behalf of my favorite retired racer, I'm choosing yes on question three.

How will you vote?

Bo-Bo Knows How to Keep His Ass in a Chair

There's an old truism that successful writers know how to keep their asses in their chairs and write. I used to think this was pretty straightforward--the secret to writing as simple as finding the time to write. But there's a little more to it than that.

As I near the end of the rough draft of my novel, I'm finding that I paid so much attention to braiding the main storylines together that I failed to notice all the loose hairs I dropped along the way. I know that stray hairs are supposed to be tamed by the hairspray of revision, but you try ignoring a shrieking chorus of the what-about-mes and see how much progress you make! I would be galloping happily along and then--bam!--fallen tree. Sure, I could leap over it, but every time I tried that, the chorus only screeched all the louder: What about me?

These brain banshees made the nails on a chalkboard sound like Mozart.

These were the moments I most wanted to check Facebook, play with Bo-Bo, study Greek, clean the toilet, torture myself with articles about Sarah Palin, and just generally invent hours of distraction under the guise of letting the fiction problem percolate at the back of my brain. But detours cause delays, and every day I'm still--still, STILL--working on this (expletive deleted) rough draft, I'm in grave danger of inappropriate laughter (yesterday, I laughed at a student when he told me how bummed he was that the only win his team logged during the entire football season was the result of a forfeit).

So for the sake of my sanity and social niceties, I kept my ass in the chair and forced my fingers to keep moving on the keys. And then the weirdest thing happened. Out of the corner of my eye, a character I hadn't realized was even in on the present dilemma showed up on the screen in my head and started hauling off that tree (oh, just stay with me a minute because telling you what he was actually doing would make very little sense given that you haven't read a lick of my book). I started to describe what the character was doing, and soon the tree was gone, and I was back to galloping.

In her novel, "The Fiction Class," Susan Breen says writing description is "like watching a Polaroid picture develop--first come the blurry shadows of the central forms, and then the details emerge slowly."

Yeah. What she said.

But I will add this. Our job as writers, then, is to keep our asses in our chairs long enough that our Polaroids make themselves known to us. Because once those Polaroids appear, you're not going to want to move your ass until your fingers have done their keyboarding thing.

Bo-Bo Knows Mom's Got Mixed Feelings About the End of Her Column

On October 22, the Boston Globe published my swan song. Since 2006, I have enjoyed writing a weekly column for The Boston Globe Sidekick section ("Campus Calendar" during the school year and "Road Trips" during the summer). This edition of "Campus Calendar" is my last.

As of Friday, October 23, Sidekick will be no more. In fact, many of my favorite parts of the paper will be no more. Or--more accurately--most of the non-hard news content will be crammed into a single section. While it sucks to get a column yanked away from me before I was ready to let it go (I liked collecting the extra paycheck and keeping a big toe in the newspaper world), I'm sadder about what this means for journalism.

I'll grant that the kind of journalism I liked best isn't exactly the kind of stuff that was ever going to shortlist me for big awards. Hell, the kind of journalism I like best wasn't ever going to shortlist me for any awards. And I'll admit that all my proudest journalism moments came from focusing on meatier issues:

• an investigative magazine article about the surge in homeless families in Massachusetts,
• a reporter-at-large profile of the Million Mom March for gun control in Washington D.C, and
• an interview with a local World War II prisoner-of-war who trusted me enough to break down as he told me his story.
  

In fact, I have a friend with a PhD in chemical engineering (the last I understood of his work, he was researching strategies for growing bananas infused with vaccines) who called my recent profile of bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult a "gimmick article" because of its "hanging with" premise--Picoult agreed to have a tarot reading done with a few million Boston-area public looking on via my article.

I say a good gimmick has its place. The standard profile asks a writer about the issue raised in the current book, offers information about the writer's local readings, and describes any interesting detours the writer took along the road to publication. The trouble? Most fans know all this. Enter gimmick journalism--give these fans a look at the question their favorite writer asks a tarot reader and take a snapshot of how she responds when the news isn't good, and the fan gets to glimpse one of the writer's previously hidden sides.

Will this kind of journalism win a Pulitzer? Hardly. But as I said before, it does it have it's place. Oh, yes, yes, and yes.

I know that the longer I go on here, the more it sounds like all this is just sour grapes. This couldn't be further from the truth. As a former journalist, I really liked keeping my skills honed and my bank account infused with extra green stuff. Yes, I'm sad to see this chapter close, but I embrace it as an opportunity to spend more hours on fiction.

And I'm finding that the universe agrees.

I'm within a week or two of finishing the rough draft of a novel about three misfit Elvis impersonators. When I walked into the Sidekick wrap party at Lucky's on Congress Street, where had the soon-to-be-ex Sidekick writers gathered? At the table under this Wertheimer photo of Elvis on a motorcycle. And within minutes of my arrival, the bee-bop band at the back was singing Frank Sinatra's That's Life. Salient lyrics?

"That's life
I tell ya, I can't deny it,
I thought of quitting baby,
But my heart just ain't gonna buy it.
And if I didn't think it was worth one single try,
I'd jump right on a big bird and then I'd fly

I've been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate,
A poet, a pawn and a king.
I've been up and down and over and out
And I know one thing:
Each time I find myself laying flat on my face,
I just pick myself up and get back in the race."

I'm not the biggest fan of hoo-doo voo-doo, but even a person more cynical than me would have to take this cosmic coupling as a sign.

What really bothers me about losing the column is this: The Boston Globe decided to combine Sidekick, Living/Arts, Food, Style, Weekend, and A&E into one daily tabloid section called G. While the mock up looks beautiful, and I have to give the Globe props for trying to maintain coverage in all these areas at a time when fiscal realities are more like nightmares, it bothers me that smooshing all this content into one space emerged as the best option. If a readership can be mapped to sections of the paper, hard news is the brain, business is the bottom line, and sports is the heart (particularly in this town), but the sections they're cramming together into G? These are the soul. Stuffing them into one box is like:

• slashing art funding in schools;
• a generation who can buy a single song on itunes and is never enriched to find that the song they hated when they first bought the CD has become the favorite;
• watching a movie before reading the book;
• watching a movie and never reading the book;
• never learning that the Beef-it's-what-for-dinner music is actually the "Hoedown" section of Aaron Copland's "Rodeo."
  

You get my point.

My husband recently bought a new piece of software that allows him to compose music and record a playback without having to record individual musical parts manually. Mostly that means he writes music with his instruments, translates it into line notation, and then has the computer play the finished score for him. He's been playing around with exercises that embrace his heavy metal teen years. I particularly like grooving to a song he calls "Pigs on Parade" (it's supposed to be a Nine Inch Nails homage), and I would share it here if I wasn't absolutely technologically useless. Suffice it to say it both rocks and rolls. Hard.

So Mike decides to share his little ditty with a few key people. The response? Accolades from the likes of me and a few others, a whole lot of crickets, and one particularly chilling response from a coworker:

Why would you do that?

Mike tried to explain about the creative urge.

Oh no, the coworker said. I'm am NOT a creative person.

Yikes.

We're all creative by nature, aren't we? I don't mean everyone's a musician or a writer, a painter or theoretical physicist. But when we decide to improvise our way to a scrumptious meal, invent plans C through Z when plans A & B fail, or dream up a perfect solution to mollify an angry client, we're being creative. We forget that at our great peril.

The value of the arts is not just about the poems or paintings or stories or novels or sculptures or plays or operas. It's about what these poems and paintings and stories and novels and sculptures and plays and operas make us think. So notice the arts around you while they're still around to be noticed. You'll be a little splash of technicolor in an increasingly black and white world.