Groffle, the Awful Waffle*

I don’t like talking about the things I’m working on for various reasons and the reasons are as follows: 1) almost everything I write can be summed up in one pat sentence that leaves my project sounding at best gimmicky and at worst vaguely insane, 2) the time I spend talking about things I’m writing could be spent actually writing said things and by the way have you seen this Twitter, which retweets anyone who tweets that they are “working on [their] novel[s],” since they are clearly not doing that, and 3) I have a tendency to not write the things I plan to write, and so talking about these things leaves me, a year or so later, looking like a dope. But here’s a blog post anyway: I am writing a novel. I am giving the characters names and histories. There are relevant political and social themes. There is romance and Bechdel Test-passing. And there is, most importantly, a character written specifically to be portrayed by Amy Poehler in the big-screen adaptation. Horse, please get yourself behind this cart here.

*Not the title of my novel (yet).

The Girl Stuff Saga: Eclipse

One of the members of my manuscript committee just complimentarily called my book “Twilight for grown-ups,” which I think is everything I could want in a blurb?

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Here’s this book I wrote.

What I Read This Month: January

Well, I’ve written (a draft of) a book.

My MFA manscript features:

• a plane crash
• a floating girl
• a superhero
• a dead bird
• a verbally abusive wax figurine of Franklin Delano Roosevelt
• a sphinx
• the ghost of Katharine Hepburn
• dream sequences
• witches

Also!:

• typos (presumed)
• puns (too many)

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My name’s in a book and my bangs are too long! I am a creative woman in the 21st century. (You can send, like, an eventual $0.04 my way by purchasing Women Writing the Weird right here!)

Unfortunate Trends in My MFA Manuscript; Or, Why I’ve Spent the Last Week Cringing

• Setting scenes on Halloween to indicate that something spoooOOOOoooky may be happening.
• Spelling the word “gray” with an “e” sometimes, but not all the time.
• Describing silence as “deafening.”
• Describing children as “bent forward by the weight of their backpacks.”
• Puns.
• Using blonde hair as shorthand for attractiveness and brown hair as shorthand for mousiness.
• Ending a story with someone falling or someone flying (this literally happens in all the stories I have revised so far oh my god what is the matter with me).

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Oh, babies. They sent us the galleys today. That sentence makes me want to cry a little bit. My name’s right there on the cover. This is weird, in that all-my-dreams-coming-true sort of way.

(Here’s the Facebook page!)

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youngmanhattanite:

Illustration: Tully Mills

YM is not known for “writing” or “intelligent discourse” but we can smell it when it’s close enough. Sometimes we even find it on the Internet. As with almost everything we do, the YM Summer Intern Program started as a joke. Not a funny one, but something that would at least entertain us. I’m not a publicly sentimental type, and I won’t break tradition here, but they far exceeded my expectations.

For their final project, a PDF zine, they were given no direction other than to draw “inspiration” from here, here, here and here. Fortunately they ignored that advice and created something, dare I say, that reminds us of beauty in an ugly world? That might be a stretch but this is my favorite (ok, only) thing I’ve read all year.

The Unread: A Young Internite Zine About Not Reading That Nobody Will Read

Thanks to interns Daniel, Christian, QED, the zine contributors below and Tumblr for the magic. Follow them, love them, etc.

Mike Barthel on Malcolm Lowry’s “Under the Volcano” (p. 3)
Tyler Coates on T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (p.3)
Miles Klee on “The Bible” (p. 4)
Jonathan Bogart on Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” (p. 4)
Katie Coyle on Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” (p. 4)
Lenore Beadsman on Jane Austen’s “Emma” (p. 5)
Jake Cleland on David Foster Wallace’s “The Pale King” (p. 5)
Jeremy Gordon on Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” (p. 6)
Brad Nelson on Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians” (p. 7)
Alex Christman on “The Bible” (p. 7)
Bethany on Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States (p. 7)
David Greenwald on Science-Fiction (p. 8)
Katherine St. Asaph on J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” (p.8)
SYH on Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are” (p. 9)
YM Intern Christian Carter on Toni Morrison’s “Sula” (p. 9)
YM Intern Daniel Kolitz on Ancient Greek Literature (p. 10)
YM Intern QED on Gunther Grass’ “Local Anaesthetic” (p. 11)

Totally took this as yet another opportunity to inform the world that I’ve read Ulysses. (Seriously though, this is really good! Well done, interns! And everybody else I guess.)