There are many tropes. Busty, blonde damsels. Brittle, brunette mistresses. Feisty, red-headed warriors. Alternatively: White-Male-Hero-With-Somnolent-Eyes-Yet-Aerodynamic-Cheek-Bones vs. Anything. Or the ever-plotless vengeance against a villain with no real motivation for villainy save an inscrutable need to inconvenience Our Hero. We know these tropes well. They’re practically family. If one came to your door and asked to come in, you might check for a judicious nod from your mother, but you’d open that door.
blogging
Ryan vs. New York City: A Story of Trash, Bingo, and Self-Assuredness
(No, I’m not in the photo. I’m taking the photo. Stop creepin’)
I spent the past few days in New York and I wasn’t in complete agony!
Now, before I go further, I want to reject the notion that I blindly despise NYC because I went to school in Boston. Honestly, I’m shocked you’d even go and make that assumption. It really makes me questions how comfortable I am talking with you. What other prejudices are you projecting onto me? You, my reader, are probably a very paranoid and miserable person.
Read moreRyan vs. New York City: A Story of Trash, Bingo, and Self-Assuredness
Book Review: Proxy by Alex London
Alex London’s Proxy is probably one of the coolest concepts I’ve encountered in a while. I feel like most dystopian societies resemble one another in their foundation of a oppressive system, but rarely am I as captivated by a dystopia as I was with Proxy. Reading this book was an act of investigation, not only because I wanted to find out what happened next but because the world of Proxy is created with such vivid detail, and with such sound world-building, that it feels nearly tactile. There are some coercive plot devices that make the book feel a tad unstable, and sure, I wasn’t really swayed by either the romance or the twists, but these are easy to overlook when the rest of Proxy was so good.
16 Essentials for Succeeding as A Writer in 2014
1. Crippling Self-Doubt Cutely Coupled With Billowing Anxiety
2. Wool Socks (trust me)
On Resolutions
There’s something sickly about resolutions. I think it has to do with the way they’re made; either uttered furtively or pronounced with great enthusiasm (but always as a shamed self-reprimand), and they’re always precipitated by something arbitrary. I mean that as: it isn’t your weight, or how you feel about your size, but the time of year that drums up your resolution. It isn’t your generally aloof nature, or your family’s naturally sparse dynamic, but the death of a cousin that makes you resolve to stay in touch.
The Good Things of January 23, 2014
So many great things happened today! Here they are, listed, for your accessing pleasure:
Chocolate Therapy
So a few nights ago I was working at the ice cream shop. A grandmother brought in her two little girls, and the older one ordered the flavor called Chocolate Therapy. Seeing this, the younger one also ordered Chocolate Therapy, to which the grandmother (who had the best, bright red blow-out since David Bowie), gasped and said, “Why, I didn’t know you were a chocolate therapy girl!” The little sister seemed to read a pejorative meaning into the exclamation (shame on you grandma!) and so, thinking I’d be helping, I whispered huskily over the counter, “I, too, am a chocolate therapy girl.”
Anne Lamott and Sand Castles
“You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the … Read moreAnne Lamott and Sand Castles
Necessary Frenzy
I’m curious about how many writers are full time in their writing, and how many hold down some other ‘traditional’ role (such as, I imagine, hair dressing, or manning the salad bar at Hometown Buffet). A writer friend of mine and I aways giggle at the writers who, online, allude to their lifestyle that is undefined by any obligations save their manuscript (read: unemployed) while also somehow managing to avoid publication ardently. What do they do? What do they want to do? What is that like? Is it deadening? It sounds deadening.
Think Of All the Blogs
Think of all the blogs. The abandoned ones specifically. The emaciated, pocked, forgotten vessels littered across the virtual ether, with a few heartfelt sentences rattling around in their dead bellies, with long shadows turned velvety in the crepuscular light.