editor (who flirts with everybody, who always thinks I’m up to something naughty or deep when the explanation is always quite dorky, and with whom I had a massive obsession years ago, but now I roll my eyes at him, both in front of him and behind his back): W, why do you go stomping [...]
Not quite news, but news-ish for me: have written a story, and am going to send it out to journals. Wrote this piece for a reading last weekend, which went surprisingly well considering humidity everybody sweated through. Truth be told, may have been because of everybody’s discomfort that I felt so much at ease that [...]
I am coding a manuscript for the design department, and the pages are very clean, so far just two elements to code—story title (ST) and space break (#)—which made me think of fiction using only words, that is sans poem or letter extracts, or charts/graphs/pictures/etc., which then made me think of the stupid computerized picture [...]
Working on a 900-plus-page novel at the office, and my proofreader has queried every instance of a comma-less “too”—i.e., “He laughed too,” as opposed to “He laughed, too.”
It depends on the style the author prefers, of course, plus my boss once instructed me not to globally add or remove such commas, as it really depends [...]
An editor was in my office. I gently chastised him for passing on my friend’s manuscript. He felt remorse, and admitted that he couldn’t yet bear to part with the book (it’s sitting in his office at home) even though he and his boss decided in the end that we weren’t the right house for [...]
Drama at work. Drama at work. What to do about all the drama at work?
I’m caught somehow.
Didn’t mean to be. Made it clear to those involved to keep me out of it.
But now somebody is crying in her office because of some Facebook note (she had to explain Facebook to me first).
Getting out my wallet [...]
Editorial assistant is steaming mad. Three of us, women, are in the hallway listening to her. Two men pass by at different points and say, “I smell a revolution brewing.” The first man looks like he wants to lead us; the second looks scared.
*
Editorial assistant starts crying through her rant. Her boss is impossible. Her [...]
Last night:
JF: w, please have a sip of my wine.
me: Girl, I’m Asian. It’s like, two sips and I’m done!
*
“You look like you frequent bars,” says the editor.
“Not above Twenty-third Street,” I say.
“Don’t you ever venture above Twenty-third?”
“No.”
“Me either.”
“Why do you need to go to a bar above Twenty-third Street?”
“The author insists. It’s like he [...]
Oh fuck (scuse my French)—while I’ve been writing like a NaNoWri mofo, deadlines have sailed past me left and right, and I just realized that another one has been missed. I hope the lady who hired me isn’t too pissed, especially as I already have a history of being late with her.* I hope I [...]
Phone at work rang. Caller ID said it was somebody from the hallway. Likely a coworker who’d forgotten her card key, or a freelancer dropping something off or picking something up.
I said, “Hello?”
He said, “Hello, it’s me—A.”
He’d e-mailed me a couple of weeks ago and had left me a voicemail last week. I’d ignored both. [...]
Around 1:00 a.m., nodded off with my proofreading spread out all around me on the bed, and woke on my own at 8:00 a.m. “Discombobulated” is how one’s day starts when one closes eyes for what seems to be just a second but turns out to be seven fitful hours. And my day continues to be [...]
Managed to finagle free dance classes by slipping my name onto a popular instructor’s guest list (J says to leave the guilt behind), and went to his class today, an intermediate/advanced level where at several points he stopped us in the middle of the routine à la Debbie Allen: “I don’t know why I’m wasting my [...]
Called a freelancer today to see if she could proofread a graphic novel for me. I usually use e-mail to correspond with freelancers, but for some reason this morning (probably due to cool sunshine after big rain last night) was feeling a little gregarious, so used phone. And as I was describing job, silence from her. So [...]
When we compare a film based on a novel to the novel itself, the quasi-infinite sum of instant data that the image delivers, in contrast to the parsimony, the poverty itself, of the notations of the corresponding sentence in the novel, allows us to see how closely fiction’s effectiveness parallels the methods of acupuncture. Indeed, [...]
My supervisor who’s situated beside me just said “Morning” as he passed my office on his way to the water cooler. I have a crush on him for that alone. A “Morning” and a smile should be delivered every day. Am proofreading a beautiful book right now; also, am holding on to my professor’s words from last night [...]
A loud solitude occurs at one o'clock in the morning.
E-mail me: loudsolitude (at) gmail (dot) com.
Surprise me: Amazon wish list.
