Girl Detective

Jennifer Weiner does a hilarious reading of Curtis Sittenfeld’s review of Melissa Banks’s The Wonder Spot. Sittenfeld’s Prep was given to me by a friend, so it’s on my nightstand now, though the reviews I’ve read have been less than compelling. At a presentation I attended earlier this year, Michael Cart, a young-adult fiction expert I’ve quoted before, wondered if Prep would have been better with an editor familiar with the young adult genre, since it includes a lot of typical YA cliches.

I loved Banks’s first book, a novel in stories, The Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing. The Wonder Spot, the victim of Sittenfeld’s review, is in transit to my local library right now.

Yet at bat on my reading list is Paradise by A.L. Kennedy, on deck is The Fall by Simon Mawer, and in the hole is Family Matters by David Guterson, all library books that have a return date. I think my library to-be-read books are going to create a black hole as they crash through the surface of my nightstand, where they reside alongside the “books I already own that I intend to read real soon” and “graphic novels that I’ve bought recently”. I’m not sure that taking the phrase “on the nightstand” literally has been the motivator that I thought it would be.

I recently embarked on the 6th draft of my novel. I took a brief detour when something–my muse, the devil?–whispered in my inner ear to switch to present tense.

“Present tense is stupid,” pronounced my husband G. Grod when I mentioned this to him. I tried it anyway. It was excruciatingly slow. Normally I am a fast editor, but it took me about six hours to get through fewer than twenty pages. The response of my writing group was not as blunt as G. Grod’s had been, but it was clear they weren’t fans of the change. I promised I’d switch back to past tense. Then one of them said that in a workshop she’d taken, the writer/instructor related that she started each new draft fresh, writing from memory, using her old draft as an occasional guide. I’ve read two books by that author, both of which I admired a great deal. The advice was scary–write it again? When it seems so close to ready to send out?

I’ve given it a shot. The new draft is going much more quickly than did the present-tense debacle, but much more slowly than if I was line-editing my last draft. I’m coming up with some different stuff, though, and I like that I’m unshackled from all those sentences I’ve written. This new draft may take longer than I’d like to produce. Then again, which draft doesn’t?

I start off with all good intentions on the latest revision of my novel. Then my mind wanders. I wonder what happened to that guy I liked sophomore year in college. I Google him. I fail to turn up a valid hit. I go back to the novel. Then I go back to Google and make my search more specific. I get what might be a valid hit, but can’t confirm. I return to my novel. I return to Google and try a few more variations till I find a picture, in which he looks ridiculous. Good riddance. Return to novel. Return to Google a few more times for different people, with varying results. Find a short story that contains names of two guys I dated, and they weren’t common names. Get creeped out and return to novel. Google Girl Detective and am pleased to find this new site finally listed on page two. Old site still number 1, mostly because of a few accidental zeitgeist topics. Google my real name, which has never turned up results, and find a piece I submitted that got published, unbeknownst to me.

I now have an actual, valid writing credit. And I wouldn’t have known about it if I hadn’t been avoiding my latest revision. The moral of the story may be that Google distraction can be beneficial to my writing. But maybe not.

From Bookslut:

There’s coverage of Lionel Shriver, the US-born author who won the Orange Prize yesterday for We Need to Talk About Kevin, at The Scotsman, The Independent, the BBC, The Times, the CBC, Reuters, and This Is London. Much is made of her traditionally masculine first name and her decision not to have children. (Quick, how many male authors have you seen get quizzed incessantly about their lack of offspring? I think it’s about…let me do the math here…yeah, about zero. Ah, vive le double standard.)

Well, yes, but the male authors who don’t get quizzed haven’t written a book with a main character of a mother who doesn’t form a bond with the child that goes on to commit mass murder.

If Ms. Shriver doesn’t want to have kids, I applaud her decision to buck convention. The premise of this book smacks of an extreme apologia, one which, however well-written, doesn’t compel me to read it. A simple “no, not for me” would suffice.

And both blew right by me at the beginning of this month. The first is my anniversary of moving to Minneapolis from Philadelphia, which was seven years ago. The second is the anniversary of the first post on the original Girl Detective, which I started three years ago.

I was reminded of the anniversaries this morning when I saw a house with a roof bashed in by a fallen tree. When I moved to Minneapolis in June, I was stunned to find huge uprooted trees everywhere I looked. It had been a record year for tornados. I’d known to expect bad winters, but bad summers in addition to bad winters seemed like we’d made a poor choice of where to live. Seven years later, I’m very happy with where we live. Tornados are a fact of life in the midwest, but the season is short and I’d much rather have them than earthquakes. We considered moving back to Philly both after Drake was born and when my husband G. Grod was laid off. It’s hard living far from family, but we like living in a politically aware area, with good schools, libraries, lakes, used bookstores, writers, writing classes and events, grocery cooperatives and local businesses like our coffee shop.

Just over three years ago, my friend M. Giant said he’d started a weblog called Velcrometer. What a great way to establish a writing practice, I thought, and quickly followed suit. I now write more, and more regularly, than I ever did before. I have yet to be paid for my writing, but I’m working on two novel manuscripts in addition to this weblog, so perhaps that’s a goal for a future anniversary.

To illustrate the book and movie reviews here, I’ve used images from a few websites along with their links. This is not, though, the most considerate and ethical practice, as I was reminded after following this link from Conversational Reading. Until I figure out a way to put the images up efficiently and more ethically, I will do text-only reviews.

On the eve of starting the next draft of my novel, I re-read this book for inspiration, book #34 in my 50 book challenge for the year. I’m thrilled to re-read. It’s something I did when I was younger, before I got overwhelmed by all the good books out there. But re-reading is a practice, even a skill, that I want to cultivate. The first time I go through a book, I read to see what happens. I race ahead to find out. Subsequent readings allow me to savor the the choices the author made in terms of language, craft, and story.

Speak is teen fiction, and one of my favorite books, not only of recent years but perhaps ever. The main character and narrator is Melinda, who starts ninth grade with no friends, because she called the police during an end-of-summer party. Both times I read this, Melinda’s voice reached out and grabbed me, and hauled me along her very sad and yet extremely funny story.

It is my first morning of high school. I have seven new notebooks, a skirt I hate, and a stomachache…

Older students are allowed to roam until the bell, but ninth-graders are herded into the auditorium. We fall into clans: Jocks, Country Clubbers, Idiot Savants, Cheerleaders, Human Waste, Eurotrash, Future Fascists of America, Big Hair Chix, the Marthas, Suffering Artists, Thespians, Goths, Shredders. I am clanless. I wasted the last weeks of summer watching bad cartoons. I didn’t go to the mall, the lake, or the pool, or answer the phone. I have entered high school with the wrong hair, the wrong clothes, the wrong attitude. And I don’t have anyone to sit with.

I am outcast.

The ending is so fitting that it flirts with overdetermination, yet it is so balanced that I don’t want to change one jot of it. I am frankly envious of the author who wrote such a compelling character, powerful voice, and wrenching story. I love this book.

This was also the eleventh book I finished this month. If I keep up this pace I’m going to beat my goal handily. Maybe I should give Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle a try. It feels as if the more I read, the more I’m able to read. Some of the books I’ve read this month were short, but some weren’t–one was the nearly 1,000-page Don Quixote! I feel I’m a better, faster reader than I was before I gave myself this challenge.

I cleaned out my current email inbox yesterday and today, from over 80 messages down to less than 10. Unfortunately, I’ve still got 35 messages in my former email program from April of ‘03 to spring of ‘05. I read email in the morning, when I snatch a few moments here and there, or at night, when I’m tired and want to watch TV or read my book. Email is reading and writing. These require an awake brain, so I’m better mid-day than I am at either end. I have to continually remind myself of an acronym for handling email I learned at my former job, DRAFS:

D: Delete. Do you really need to keep this info?
R: Reply, then delete.
A: Act. Get up and do something, like transfer the information somewhere else, or call someone.
F: Forward. Be sparing and thoughtful. If it sounds like an urban myth, check www.snopes.com first.
S: Save information that want to refer to later but don’t need to do anything about now.

My husband G. Grod suggested that I may be trying to do too much, i.e., read 50ish pages of Don Quixote every day, read another book, write this blog, read other blogs, go to yoga class a few times a week, work on my novel, read excerpts of other people’s novels for my writing group. And, oh yeah, take care of my small child. Unsurprisingly, I’m dropping some balls here and there. Last week, the blog ball got dropped. I apologize for the lack of notice for a post-free week.

I took a break from the weblog to focus on other writing. As has happened before, all my writing slowed. Progress on manuscript #1 was painfully slow. I dug out manuscript #2 to change things up. Things didn’t improve, so I’m back to the blog in the hope it will kick my writing and editing back into high gear.

I wrote previously here on why I blog. Simply put, blogging has enabled me to adopt a consistent writing practice. A tougher question, though, and one I didn’t become conscious of for a long time is this: why do I blog about those things about which I blog?

For the long time my topics were whatever leapt out of my head and onto my keyboard. Often, this was a hyper stream of consiousness, or worse, a daily list or diary without commentary or insight. Provoked by something I read at Mental Multivitamin, though, I took a long look at what I’d been writing about. Why was I making private things public? I reaped a benefit from blogging of writing practice, but what potential benefit to readers was some mundane snippet from my life?

I wrote at length here on my decision not to chronicle any further gripes about motherhood. Since then, I have become increasingly aware of mothers who use their kids as grist for their writing. Meg Wolitzer, who has a new book out, wrote on this at Salon here.

The notion of parents mortifying their children is nothing new… But the children of writers are given a mortification all their own. It reaches beyond the hokeypokey and deep into regions unfamiliar to the children of management consultants and travel agents.

In its most common form, the embarrassment occurs when a writer is simply doing his or her job: describing the world in an unflinching, candid manner, and casually borrowing recognizable bits and pieces from real life. Occasionally, a writer borrows much more than that. This was the case with A.A. Milne, who used his son Christopher Robin as a character without asking. The child grew up and was left to languish in bitterness, loathing the father who left him frozen in a kind of twisted, eternal moppethood. It seems clear that writers who use their children to advance their own work are guilty of some kind of unsavory pimping, and that those children — those trapped-in-amber, beloved figures from picture books and novels — have a right to feel furious.

While this quote has not scared me enough to stop writing about Drake at all, it did confirm that I can keep the grumbly bits, both his and mine, to myself. No need to immortalize those in ether. So writing in detail about my kid was no good. What, then, of my measly life was worth putting out there for public inspection? At this point, I was reminded of a story.

I was a junior in college, and begged my parents to let me have a car at school. They relented, perhaps based on the “it’s for my job” part of the argument, which was actually true. I drove that car hither and yon. After a while, its performance waned. I took it to a service station and received a call soon after.

Knowing how inadequate my answer was, I doubt I kept the upspeak out of my 20-year-old voice. “Uh, no one ever told me I had to do that?”

The spirit of that story is why I blog what I blog. I can’t know something till I learn about it. In the spirit of my girl-detective forebears, I like to follow clues and links. I blog about things that I find informative or interesting, in the hope that someone else will, too. I’m hardly an early adopter, so most of what I write here won’t be ground-breaking or trend-setting. Perhaps it will simply be one more small voice that helps you make a decision about what movie to watch, what book to read, or what have you. There is a danger, though, that I might state the obvious, which I’ll illustrate with another story.

I was visiting my sister Sydney some years ago. She had just gotten a kitten, sleek and black with bright green eyes. He zoomed about her house, provoking the dog and charming me by pouncing around my room and sneaking up into the box spring under my bed. I was impressed by how cute, spirited and clever he was. Later, I related his antics to friends of mine who have cats. They looked at me oddly. “Uh, Girl Detective? All kittens do that.”

Please forgive me, then, when I post something obvious. One person’s kitten is another person’s oil change.

I’m reading a manuscript a week for the novel class I’m taking, and I keep seeing two spaces after a period rather than one. This issue cropped up regularly at my last job, which was copyediting.

Two spaces after a period is a practice left over from the days of manual typewriters. Nearly all fonts in word-processing programs are able to ensure that one space after the period is sufficient for visual separation. Those people who continue to use two spaces end up with a document that looks off kilter.

Every time I bring this up, someone argues with me. When in doubt, I always consult The Chicago Manual of Style. Here is the answer from their website to the question of one space or two:

But introducing two spaces after the period causes problems: (1) it is inefficient, requiring an extra keystroke for every sentence; (2) even if a program is set to automatically put an extra space after a period, such automation is never foolproof; (3) there is no proof that an extra space actually improves readability…it’s probably just a matter of familiarity (Who knows? perhaps it’s actually more efficient to read with less regard for sentences as individual units of thought–many centuries ago, for example in ancient Greece, there were no spaces even between words, and no punctuation); (4) two spaces are harder to control for than one in electronic documents (I find that the earmark of a document that imposes a two-space rule is a smattering of instances of both three spaces and one space after a period, and two spaces in the middle of sentences); and (5) two spaces can cause problems with line breaks in certain programs.

So, in our efficient, modern world, I think there is no room for two spaces after a period. In the opinion of this particular copyeditor, this is a good thing.

Before I got married to my husband G. Grod, my grandmother asked me, “Is he handy?”

“Not really,” I replied sadly, thinking of my late grandfather, who built furniture and created electonic gadgets in addition to holding a day job and being a musician. “Not like Poppa was.”

Years later, I have have reconsidered her question, and have a different answer. What she meant by handy was if he was good at those same things that her husband had excelled at–stuff around the house. I have never been good at those things. G. Grod claimed not to be either, but over the years, and especially since we moved into our new old house last fall, he continues to surprise me, such as when he fixed a leaking radiator last December.

Where he excels, however, is in tech support, which I think is the new frontier for handiness. I’m a writer. I adopt technology on an as-needed basis. But when something funky happens, like when I get an error message, I am not able to fix things. G. Grod, on the other hand, is almost always able to fix things. The only time I’ve ever lost data was on my PDA, when I went too long between backups. On our computer, though, I don’t think I’ve ever lost data. Whatever happens, G. Grod is always able to rescue whatever I was working on, oftentimes even though I hadn’t yet saved it. (I am terrible about frequent saving, so he has now set our computer to do it automatically, electronically compensating for my shortcoming.) Additionally, our system hardly ever crashes, error messages are rare, and we have never had a virus.

G. Grod has set up a smoothly functioning system that is technologically progressive, ethically correct and defiantly anti-Microsoft. We use Debian GNU/Linux (cute penguin!) operating system, and Free programs for things like word processing and email. I type entries in Gedit, a text editor. The draft of the novel I just finished is a PDF in OpenOffice.org Writer. I use two mail programs, Ximian (now Novell) Evolution (cute monkey!) and Mozilla Thunderbird. As is perhaps obvious, I am more entranced by the cute icons than I am by how these things work. They do work, thanks to G. Grod. Because they work, I can focus on writing; I don’t have to wrestle my words from mercurial electronic programs.

That, for me, is pretty handy.

Over the past few years, I’ve found other writer friends whose partners are technologically inclined, as is mine. It makes me wonder whether we creative types are now seeking out partners with specialized knowledge, in a technology-age form of natural selection.

This is one of my favorite quotes, from an interview on Book Sense with Lee Smith. I printed it out, and it has occupied a prominent place on my desk ever since. She is responding to a question about young women writers, but I think her advice works for everyone.

My advice for young women writers is just do it. Don’t wait for some ideal point in your life when you will finally have “time to write.” No sane person ever has time to write. Don’t clean the bathroom, don’t paint the hall. Write. Claim your time. And remember that a writer is a person who is writing, not a person who is publishing. If you are serious about it, you will realize early on that (particularly if you expect to have children) you can’t take on a high-power career in addition to writing. You probably can’t be a surgeon, and have children, and “write on the side.” (On the other hand, you could marry a surgeon, thereby solving the whole problem.)

In the past five days, I wrote an additional ten thousand words. I edited thousands more. I re-worked the beginning. I developed a character to make her more sympathetic.

I have just finished the fourth draft (or is it the fifth?) of my novel.

The idea for the book is good; I know this. I also know that I am not yet a skilled enough writer to actually write the book that I envision.

I will soon embark upon the next draft. I may eventually have to leave this novel behind. I may never be a good enough writer to write it. Then, I will work on another. That is also a humbling thought.

Worse, though, would be giving up.

I started a blog in June of 2002 because I wanted to practice my writing and editing skills. Writing a public weblog ensured that I’d write, regularly. This regular writing has also helped me to get over writers block. Best of all, though, it’s helped me become a fairly fast writer and editor. I’m writing a teen novel, and am nearly through the fourth draft. Today, during a lovely long nap that my son Drake took, I was able to write another 2800 words, as well as edit the almost 4000 words I’d written over the previous two evenings.

At different points in time when I’ve had other things going on, I’ve thought that I should, and even tried to, take a break from blogging. It hasn’t worked. What I’ve found is that writing begets more writing. The more writing I do, the more writing I want to do, and the more writing I’m able to do.

For a long time in my life I fancied myself a writer, though I hardly wrote at all. Writing a weblog changed that. Now hardly a day goes by that I don’t write something, somewhere. Blogging gave me the structure for a writing practice, so I could stop just talking about being a writer, and actually get down to the messy business of writing itself.

I was away for a week, but it’s still taken me some time to put together my own response to the 01/30/05 New York Times piece on mommy blogging, “Mommy (and Me) by David Hochman.

Many of the responses to Hochman’s piece have been angry and defensive. They see his piece as the latest attack in the mommy wars. I used to consider myself a mommy blogger; I even wrote here and here against those who would write against them. I didn’t find Hochman’s piece to be an attack on mommy blogs, though. There was critique, but I also found empathy, e.g.,

Daniel J. Siegel, a psychiatrist on the faculty of the Center for Culture, Brain and Development at the University of California, Los Angeles, and co-author of “Parenting From the Inside Out,” said that what is being expressed in these Web sites “is the deep, evolutionarily acquired desire to rise above invisibility, something parents experience all the time.” He explained, “You want to be seen not just by the baby whose diaper you’re changing, but by the world.”

and

But perhaps all the online venting and hand-wringing is actually helping the bloggers become better parents and better human beings. Perhaps what these diaries provide is “a way of establishing an alternate identity that makes parenting more palatable,” said Meredith W. Michaels, a philosophy professor at Smith College and the co-author of “The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women.” “You’re turning your life into a story that helps answer the question, ‘Why on earth am I doing this?’ ”

Yet many of the responses to the piece, some written by the bloggers quoted in it, were unhappy with it, and disagreed with statements like

Today’s parents - older, more established and socialized to voicing their emotions - may be uniquely equipped to document their children’s’ lives, but what they seem most likely to complain and marvel about is their own. The baby blog in many cases is an online shrine to parental self-absorption.

I found that Hochman’s piece contained both empathy and criticism and I appreciated both. Yet the responses relayed mostly a perception of criticism:

Andrea Buchanan of Mother Shock grumbles here that her book but not her blog was named, and disagrees that parental blogging is anything “remarkable.”

Alice Bradley of Finslippy calls it “faintly damning” here.

Melissa Summers of Suburban Bliss says here that it’s “vaguely insulting.”

Ayelet Waldman of Bad-Mother gripes here that she was only quoted on the second page. Read down to a comment by “metacara” that is critical of Waldman’s comments in the article.

Heather Armstrong of Dooce notes here that

I had a hard time containing my glee � not because I and some of my fellow women writers were made out to be selfish, resentful, overreacting pigs in search of validation; funny that none of us were informed that the article would run with that notion when we were interviewed � but that my child�s green eyes were staring at me from the pages of a national paper.

T.O. Mama of MUBAR writes here what most other mommy bloggers say is the best and most balanced response to Hochman’s piece. She says “the article was not troubling itself but it raised some tricky issues.” Yet what’s interesting is the string of comments that follows her post, most of which criticise the NYT piece, and don’t acknowledge it as complicated.

Jen Weiner (pronounced WHY-ner, not WEEner, FYI) of Snarkspot clarifies, with her tongue firmly in cheek, here that her blog “isn’t just an ‘online shrine to parental self-absorbtion.’ It’s an online shrine to authorial self-absorbtion, too!”

I think Weiner’s comment is interesting, because she acknowledges on her blog, as she did in her quote in the NYT piece, that the parent blogs are self-involved. Her breezy tone, though, refuses to let this stick as a judgment. She goes a step further to say that her blog (a journal/diary type of blog) was self-involved before her daughter arrived, and has remained self-involved beyond her daughter since she became a mother. Weiner’s quote implies, correctly, I think, that many blogs are self-involved. And it’s that point that T.O. Mama took issue with from the NYT piece. Not that mommy blogs were being questioned, but that they were being questioned while other blogs weren’t; why are moms singled out for special attention and criticism?

Perhaps the most prevalent gripe about mommy blogs is that many are poorly written. True, but there are a lot of poorly written blogs out there, mommy or not. And while some are poorly written, others are both well written and funny.

So what’s the harm, then, if they’re well written and funny? They can be entertaining, and, as noted in Hochman’s article, they can also help struggling parents out of isolation.

One harm is noted by Hochman, who wonders about what the child in the future will think, “But the question is, at whose expense? How will the bloggee feel, say, 16 years from now, when her prom date Googles her entire existence?”

Hochman further quotes blogger Ayelet Waldman, “Fundamentally children resent being placed at the heart of their parents’ expression, and yet I still do it.”

Additionally, much of the content of mommy blogs is venting. Venting, in short spurts, can be a good thing. It releases pressure so that a system can function in equilibrium. But venting as a matter of everyday practice isn’t healthy, for either the ventor or the ventee. It devolves into bitching. Griping. A lowest common denominator of discourse.

The author of the weblog Mental Multivitamin noted the harm of such venting in an email she wrote in the wake of the NYT piece that she quotes here:

…if, in fact, weblogs are a historical record of the everyday (as the NYT suggests), [then] angst-soaked entries about the flu or potty training or whatever will be prevailing message of our time — not, for example, the pursuit of a rich interior life via reading, thinking, learning; that child- and spouse-bashing, however cleverly written, will represent the common experience of the ordinary mother, not celebration, wonder, merriment….

For more on parenting and mommy blogs by Mental Multivitamin, see her response to the Hochman article here. Interestingly, she also focused on the criticism rather than the empathy in his piece; unlike the other writers I’ve noted, she applauded his critique.

I have a further concern, though. Even if books and blogs contain both “angst-soaked entries” as well as “celebration, wonder and merriment”, then I believe that the former is what leaves a more lasting impression; I don’t believe a reader gets a balance of both. When writers detail the drudgery and the joy, the drudgery gets more print. It’s more concrete, it’s more physical, while the moments of joy and wonder are more fleeting and often emotional. The response to Hochman’s piece mirrored the difficult, if not impossible task, of creating a balanced portrayal that includes both difficulty and joy. His piece contained both, yet the negative got the most attention.

I wrote on one of my previous sites, Mama Duck, here, about how telling the truth about the difficulties had been a trend in recent motherhood books that I found myself unwittingly repeating in my mommy blog. I vowed to try harder. That was last June. Even with that awareness, I still feel like I failed to overcome the focus on the mundane that Mental Multivitamin decries.

In the 1950’s, we had a June Cleaver portrayal of motherhood as noble and tidy. Then there was the antithesis of telling it like it is, starting in the mid 1990’s, perhaps most notably with Ann Lamott’s memoir Operating Instructions. Now that antithesis is reaching a fever pitch with the mommy blogs. Again, we have a backlash, the unfair criticism that T.O. Mama questions. The backlash means that the antithesis of the truth-telling is no-better than the fog filters of yesteryear. I take this as a challenge to move toward a synthesis: something that celebrates the joys, tells the truth about the pain, but doesn’t dwell so much on the latter than the former is effaced.

Like many others, I was blogging before I became a mom. I blogged about pregnancy, birth and motherhood because I was so gobsmacked by the experiences. I felt unprepared and very alone. What the New York Times piece and what the multitude of responses to it have done, though, is to make it very clear that while I felt alone, I never was. There is an ever-growing number of books and blogs that proves that many women (and men) are surprised and frustrated by the challenges of parenthood. The point I have reached, then, is that there is no need to add my voice to the crowd. I no longer care to participate in the “motherhood is hard” discussion. This is not just true of writing, it’s also true of reading. What I write is inextricably tied to what I read. Reading and writing about the tough stuff just encourages me to focus on the difficulties, instead of keeping my eyes open for the moments of joy and surprise.

I became a parent because I wanted to learn. What I want to write about is that learning process, both in being a parent and in general. I will still write from personal experience, which includes motherhood. But I’m going to write in a way that emphasizes the learning and the joys. I’m not going to pretend that the tough stuff doesn’t exist. But I think I’m going to share that privately, rather than with all and sundry online.

I’m experiencing a maddening form of writers block. I have plenty to write about, but I can’t shape it into a form that pleases me. I feel as if I’ve lost any small skill to write in a coherent, meaningful way. I know the way out of this rut. It’s to write, trying to keep things brief and focused. Even that simple-sounding prescription feels beyond me today, though.

The current blockage is ironic. I haven’t posted in over a week because I was out of town for a writers conference. The speakers and sessions sent a combined message of humility and hope: write, hone your skills, continue in spite of almost inevitable rejection, and someday you may be published.

Midway through the conference I experienced a whopping low. I was suddenly certain that I was a hack and that my manuscript was crap and not worth any further time or effort. Either of those might be true. But if I follow the advice to keep writing and learning, then someday they might not be true.

I hope to be a better writer, therefore I write. It’s very simple, really.

There are some linguistic lost causes that I mourn nonetheless. One is the chronic misuse of hopefully, which means full of hope. Another is the use of “whom”. Most people avoid the issue by avoiding the word. More and more I think this is what the end result will be. It saddens me, though. I like “whom” and wish it would be used more and used correctly.

I’m not necessarily one to talk, though. I knew that whom should be used an an indirect object after a preposition, e.g., Ask not for whom the bell tolls…. Who is to replace subjects and direct objects, e.g., Who’s on first? I was writing a letter recently, though, to someone whose intellect impresses me. I was trying to make a point, and didn’t want my point to be obscured by bad usage. I had a few sentences that were demanding that I choose between who and whom and I had to make my best guess because I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what part of speech they were. I was tired and I couldn’t lay hands on my copy of Chicago Manual of Style. It wasn’t near the other writing books like it should have been. Instead, after our move and in the absence of a formal filing system, I found it later wedged between The Mad Scientist’s Club and The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. (But of course. What was I thinking, not looking there?)

It wouldn’t have helped me, though. It has no entry on who/m. Instead I had to turn to little Strunk and White, (which, as I write this, I can no longer find. GRRRR.) Even if I could quote it, it wouldn’t help. It had a slight entry that did not illuminate. Instead it forced me to come up with my own rule. If you can substitute s/he then use who, if you would use her/him, use whom. Sometimes you need to flip the words around. For example, Who is the actor whom you despise?

Sadly, I think, it may be easier to leave out whom than to wrestle so with its use.

In a comment on my dictionary entry, Zen Viking called me on my rant about free content and challenged me to elaborate.

I am sure that given a lot of time, I could write a lengthy and well-reasoned treatise on this. I don’t want to spend time on this, though, which is part of why I think content should be free. If I have to pay, or enter a whole lot of personal information, or own a computer to access information, then information is slow to get, it’s unjust in distribution and makes doing what I’m doing (in this case, writing) more difficult.

Copyright laws were invented to encourage creators to create. Over the years, they have been warped by many, including Disney, to protect profit. I don’t believe that every book, magazine, movie, newspaper or DVD should be free. I do believe there should be a free form of it, though. I also believe that restrictive copyright laws do more harm than good.

If you are interested in delving into this issue more deeply, then my husband G. Grod recommends the work of Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford University, and author of Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. Lessig was also tapped as an artist of the year by the Minneapolis City Pages, but so were Kevin Smith and Garrison Keillor, so there is some dubiety to the distinction.

From the American Heritage Dictionary, 4th edition:

Usage Note: Till and until are generally interchangeable in both writing and speech, though as the first word in a sentence until is usually preferred: Until you get that paper written, don’t even think about going to the movies. Till is actually the older word, with until having been formed by the addition to it of the prefix un-, meaning �up to.� In the 18th century the spelling ’till became fashionable, as if till were a shortened form of until. Although ’till is now nonstandard, ’til is sometimes used in this way and is considered acceptable, though it is etymologically incorrect.

I made friends with the American Heritage 4th edition when I read its usage note for he:

Usage Note: Traditionally the pronouns he, him, and his have been used as generic or gender-neutral singular pronouns, as in A novelist should write about what he knows best and No one seems to take any pride in his work anymore. Since the early 20th century, however, this usage has come under increasing criticism for reflecting and perpetuating gender stereotyping. �Defenders of the traditional usage have argued that the masculine pronouns he, his, and him can be used generically to refer to men and women. This analysis of the generic use of he is linguistically doubtful. If he were truly a gender-neutral form, we would expect that it could be used to refer to the members of any group containing both men and women. But in fact the English masculine form is an odd choice when it refers to a female member of such a group. There is something plainly disconcerting about sentences such as Each of the stars of As Good As It Gets [i.e., Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt] won an Academy Award for his performance. In this case, the use of his forces the reader to envision a single male who stands as the representative member of the group, a picture that is at odds with the image that comes to mind when we picture the stars of As Good As It Gets. Thus he is not really a gender-neutral pronoun; rather, it refers to a male who is to be taken as the representative member of the group referred to by its antecedent. The traditional usage, then, is not simply a grammatical convention; it also suggests a particular pattern of thought. �It is clear that many people now routinely construct their remarks to avoid generic he, usually using one of two strategies: changing to the plural, so they is used (which is often the easiest solution) or using compound and coordinate forms such as he/she or he or she (which can be cumbersome in sustained use). In some cases, the generic pronoun can simply be dropped or changed to an article with no change in meaning. The sentence A writer who draws on personal experience for material should not be surprised if reviewers seize on that fact is complete as it stands and requires no pronoun before the word material. The sentence Every student handed in his assignment is just as clear when written Every student handed in the assignment. �Not surprisingly, the opinion of the Usage Panel in such matters is mixed. While 37 percent actually prefer the generic his in the sentence A taxpayer who fails to disclose the source of ___ income can be prosecuted under the new law, 46 percent prefer a coordinate form like his or her; 7 percent felt that no pronoun was needed in the sentence; 2 percent preferred an article, usually the; and another 2 percent overturned tradition by advocating the use of generic her, a strategy that brings the politics of language to the reader’s notice. Thus a clear majority of the Panel prefers something other than his. The writer who chooses to use generic he and its inflected forms in the face of the strong trend away from that usage may be viewed as deliberately calling attention to traditional gender roles or may simply appear to be insensitive.