Tonight I answered my last phone at the Globe sports desk and typed in my last sailing agate. Whew. There's one caller who calls up and whenever it's a woman he just promptly hangs up, and that guy called like 6 times today, which ticked me off. And then the giant stat printer for dummy pages broke, which means one of the designers gave me the dirtiest looks ever (even though it was not my fault! geez, people). And I didn't get any work done with my stories.
But I'm done and it was alright. I was afraid this one copy editor would get all emotional on me. He's always asking me questions and talking my ear off with everything, and he writes me e-mails a few times a week about random stuff, like Texas sports or cycling, and I was really dreading leaving because I thought he'd be all blah. (You know what I mean.) I hate saying good-bye to people, all that, Well, what are you doing now? Keep in touch! bullshit. I'd rather just act like it's a normal day and leave. The slot guy gave me an appropriate good-bye tonight . . . "Well, I don't have anything else for you to do tonight. So good luck, and have a nice life." He was nice, but it was just right.
I'm not looking foward to Tuesday night. I'm hoping maybe I can just duck out while no one's looking. Saying good-bye to people is stupid. (Can you tell I spent my entire childhood saying good-bye to people and I'm a little averse to it all now?)
So unless I'm saying good-bye to callers at the end of phone call, I don't want to do it. And here's hoping I can get away with not doing it.
Monday, December 11, 2006
Monday, December 04, 2006
First Page of My Novel (Rewritten)
So about a week and a half ago, two weeks ago I got in the mood to write again. I was feeling confident and inspired and wordy, and had decided what needed to be reworked on the next great American novel (as my project is called). And because I know only a few people read this blog, and because these people are probably reading it to procrastinate on something else, and because I believe in indulging procrastinators, may I present: The first page.
This is the slightly reworked version. I've done a lot of good reading since being up here. I think it's helped a lot. And I already test-ran this on Loren, because at one point he inspired me to start writing my acknowledgements when I'd gotten about 100 pages in and then stumped. Loren is the best for this sort of stuff. Plus, I had Dan reading my piece for Ellen, so I had to get my other guy working on something for me too. So . . . here it is. Let me know what you think sometime when we can talk quietly. I'm silly and superstitious and don't want a lot of people who don't know what's going on jumping in and talking to me. (I realize that's weird and I'm okay with that.)
Here we go:
I don’t remember exactly when I was told that no two snowflakes were alike. There were a lot of snowflakes in Massachusetts, and each year I eagerly awaited being able to take my sled out for the first time. Our long, winding driveway sloped down to the street, perfect for sledding, bad for steering. Careening into young trees was a regular occurrence.
All those perfect, original, individual snowflakes got packed together into lopsided snowmen and elaborate snow forts. Nick and I would barricade ourselves across the lawn from each other and hurl snowballs back and forth. When we got tired, we’d throw them at birds and squirrels. We nearly always missed, except for one time I nailed a fat squirrel in a tree. It fell off the bare branch, making a poof in the snow as it landed, and then got up, dazed, staggered for a moment and leapt off deep into the trees.
When I was about six or seven, my mother dug out a microscope (I believe it was hers, from when she was in middle school) and a piece of black cloth and we looked at the snowflakes under the lens, outside in the cold. Taking her gloves off, Mom focused the view for me and let me peer at the crystalline structures, intricate as the twists and ladders of the DNA on the poster in my room. It had come free in a magazine and was an advertisement of some sort. Mom explained that each snowflake was different, just like a person. I peered down the barrel of the microscope, simultaneously understanding and confused. There were just so many; how could there be that many different ones? But there in front of me, under the glass and on top of the velvet, were perfect snowflakes. They were all different.
****
The man had never been married. One could presume that it was because his mind was so singularly focused that he couldn’t put forth the effort to care about someone else. He could barely care for himself. He frequently forgot to eat, and postdocs would bring him back Thai or sandwiches and leave them on his desk, where he would notice them and eat them. If no one brought him food, he might go eight or nine hours without eating, despite the fact that he passed a vending machine on his way from his office and lab to the stairwell. The stairwell, narrow and concrete and with peeling (probably lead) paint, let him go up three floors to the roof, where he could smoke his cigarettes, which had a slightly sweet, mellow smell to them. The postdocs smoked harsh-smelling Camels and Marlboros.
He was well-liked by his coworkers, even if they didn’t really know him. The lab technicians found him fair; when Joseph’s daughter had asthma attacks at school, he could always leave and meet her and the school nurse at the emergency room. When Schuchi’s brother found cheap last-minute tickets from Atlanta to Logan, she brought him into work with her one afternoon. Her brother sat on a stool and cheerily told everyone about how he just couldn’t get used to traditional Southern cooking, much to his new fiance’s dismay.
The man didn’t appear to have any hobbies, even though it was rumored that he came from an extremely wealthy family and he could have taken up whichever expensive hobby would have been befitting to an intelligent, healthy middle-aged man. He never talked about going skiing in Vermont over the weekend or visiting the Cape. Occasionally he joined his staff at the Irish bar down the street from the lab—no matter where you were in the greater Boston area, there was an Irish bar down the street—but he would spend his time getting other people to talk than doing any talking himself. Everyone assumed he was just devoted to his work. After all, he had been a member of the Whitehead Institute and the National Academy of Sciences, and now he was devoted to a stack of books and papers that was taking over a table in his office. It wasn’t related to his work cloning stem cells derived from the livers of rats. But whenever someone asked him what the metastasizing pile was, he merely waved a hand and said, “Just some things I’m thinking about.” No one was able to get more information than that.
This is the slightly reworked version. I've done a lot of good reading since being up here. I think it's helped a lot. And I already test-ran this on Loren, because at one point he inspired me to start writing my acknowledgements when I'd gotten about 100 pages in and then stumped. Loren is the best for this sort of stuff. Plus, I had Dan reading my piece for Ellen, so I had to get my other guy working on something for me too. So . . . here it is. Let me know what you think sometime when we can talk quietly. I'm silly and superstitious and don't want a lot of people who don't know what's going on jumping in and talking to me. (I realize that's weird and I'm okay with that.)
Here we go:
I don’t remember exactly when I was told that no two snowflakes were alike. There were a lot of snowflakes in Massachusetts, and each year I eagerly awaited being able to take my sled out for the first time. Our long, winding driveway sloped down to the street, perfect for sledding, bad for steering. Careening into young trees was a regular occurrence.
All those perfect, original, individual snowflakes got packed together into lopsided snowmen and elaborate snow forts. Nick and I would barricade ourselves across the lawn from each other and hurl snowballs back and forth. When we got tired, we’d throw them at birds and squirrels. We nearly always missed, except for one time I nailed a fat squirrel in a tree. It fell off the bare branch, making a poof in the snow as it landed, and then got up, dazed, staggered for a moment and leapt off deep into the trees.
When I was about six or seven, my mother dug out a microscope (I believe it was hers, from when she was in middle school) and a piece of black cloth and we looked at the snowflakes under the lens, outside in the cold. Taking her gloves off, Mom focused the view for me and let me peer at the crystalline structures, intricate as the twists and ladders of the DNA on the poster in my room. It had come free in a magazine and was an advertisement of some sort. Mom explained that each snowflake was different, just like a person. I peered down the barrel of the microscope, simultaneously understanding and confused. There were just so many; how could there be that many different ones? But there in front of me, under the glass and on top of the velvet, were perfect snowflakes. They were all different.
****
The man had never been married. One could presume that it was because his mind was so singularly focused that he couldn’t put forth the effort to care about someone else. He could barely care for himself. He frequently forgot to eat, and postdocs would bring him back Thai or sandwiches and leave them on his desk, where he would notice them and eat them. If no one brought him food, he might go eight or nine hours without eating, despite the fact that he passed a vending machine on his way from his office and lab to the stairwell. The stairwell, narrow and concrete and with peeling (probably lead) paint, let him go up three floors to the roof, where he could smoke his cigarettes, which had a slightly sweet, mellow smell to them. The postdocs smoked harsh-smelling Camels and Marlboros.
He was well-liked by his coworkers, even if they didn’t really know him. The lab technicians found him fair; when Joseph’s daughter had asthma attacks at school, he could always leave and meet her and the school nurse at the emergency room. When Schuchi’s brother found cheap last-minute tickets from Atlanta to Logan, she brought him into work with her one afternoon. Her brother sat on a stool and cheerily told everyone about how he just couldn’t get used to traditional Southern cooking, much to his new fiance’s dismay.
The man didn’t appear to have any hobbies, even though it was rumored that he came from an extremely wealthy family and he could have taken up whichever expensive hobby would have been befitting to an intelligent, healthy middle-aged man. He never talked about going skiing in Vermont over the weekend or visiting the Cape. Occasionally he joined his staff at the Irish bar down the street from the lab—no matter where you were in the greater Boston area, there was an Irish bar down the street—but he would spend his time getting other people to talk than doing any talking himself. Everyone assumed he was just devoted to his work. After all, he had been a member of the Whitehead Institute and the National Academy of Sciences, and now he was devoted to a stack of books and papers that was taking over a table in his office. It wasn’t related to his work cloning stem cells derived from the livers of rats. But whenever someone asked him what the metastasizing pile was, he merely waved a hand and said, “Just some things I’m thinking about.” No one was able to get more information than that.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)