minx

turn this synopsis into a powerful logline + win my eternal love. and a hundred bucks.

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 02:36:04 GMT

Oh You with the Wondrous Taste to be Reading this Blog:

Below is my working synopsis for the novel I’m working on called THE DECADENTS.

I would like to call upon the wisdom of the crowds to help me develop a punchy one- or two-sentence description that I can use at cocktail parties when people ask me what this damn book is about.

So give it a shot.

Enter a logline in the comment section below.

If I choose yours, I will give you a $100 Amazon gift certificate and name a character in the novel after you.

Contest ends whenever someone delivers up the perfect logline — or I come up with one on my own, or give up on the whole exercise, in which case I will give a $50 Amazon gift certificate to the entry that amuses (or bemuses) me the most. click for more

the art of more (money/readers/love): fighting off the scarcity complex

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 00:25:02 GMT

-- cross-posted from tribalwriter.com

1

I have a problematic relationship with money.

I didn’t learn about it growing up.

I married a man I met in college who, in the course of our marriage, became wealthy. I had no access to any of it other than what he gave me.

My attempts to carve out my own career (and income) as a dark-fantasy novelist got sidetracked by babies. Nothing had my name on it – not the house we bought together, not the car I drove, and because I didn’t know anything different, and because we lived an amazing lifestyle, I told myself I was fine with it. I didn’t want to be spoiled or ungrateful.

Two and a half years after my husband filed for divorce, and after a prolonged battle over a document I signed without a lawyer under questionable circumstances, I received a divorce settlement.

Now I’m a woman of substance, so to speak.

I have a business manager and an investment advisor and investments and a house in my name.

And yet I don’t feel any different than when I legally had nothing. Some deep part of me continues to feel impoverished, and I worry about losing everything.

So this is what it means to have a scarcity complex.

I’ve been working on mine (thank you, helpful therapist).

I read Tara Gentile’s THE ART OF EARNING and it inspired a shift in me. She talks about the “paycheck prison”: how you focus on spending less…instead of challenging yourself to develop other streams of revenue.

To create more.

It’s about unlocking your potential to create the
wealth that supports that latte habit, increases savings, decreases spending
(yes, increased earning can result in decreased spending), and creates ideas that put money to work for you & your world.

This, I all-at-once realized, is what people refer to as an abundance mentality. It’s a deep sense of the potential in you and all around you. You can use your gifts and skills to create what you need – more than you need – as you need it. Instead of worrying over the size of your pie as you fritter it away (people with a scarcity complex often indulge in careless, might-as-well-spend-it-while-i-have-it consumption), you focus on enlarging it.

What you put your attention on – grows.

(Which is why a 'gratitude practice' can be life-changing: it keeps your attention on the things you want more of.)

So simple, I know.

And yet it isn’t.

And yet it is.

A writer remarked that she was discussing with a writer friend the possibility of self-publishing her novel. Her friend started trumpeting the merits of traditional publishing…and then they were arguing over self vs traditional…and “nearly came to blows”.

What struck me was how unnecessary that argument was.

Because it assumes either one or the other.

It’s “the tyranny of either/or” …

….instead of and.

Self-publishing and traditional publishing.

In today’s rapidly changing publishing landscape, they serve different purposes and different kinds of fiction. I predict – and I’m hardly alone in this – that a successful writing career will now include a mix of both. Together, they enlarge the pie of what’s possible: the material you publish, the readership you connect with, the profit you make.

But scarcity complex can blind you to this. You find yourself ‘competing’ for resources even when the circumstances that limited those resources…have changed. You respond to the past instead of the present, and run the risk of turning your anxiety into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Perception is reality.

What you put your attention on…grows…even if it’s the dark space of lack.

Attention.

We are all competing for it.

It’s the one thing you can’t make more of. There’s only so much mindshare to go around.

We are writers competing for a readership.

But what if we focused on creating more readers?

On using platform/social media — trust, influence, credibility, authority — different kinds and forms of storytelling — to reach into the neighboring entertainments and bring people back to books.

What would that look like?

Something happens when you start thinking in terms of creating more instead of settling for less. You start asking different questions, which frames your thinking in different ways.

As Chris Guillebeau puts it:

Fighting over a Small Pie = dumb idea, rooted in scarcity, fear, and small-mindedness.
Expanding the Pie = abundance, rooted in a belief that there is enough for everyone.

When you strive to expand the pie, you redefine the category and change the game. You utilize your strengths and talents and knowledge. You experiment with new ideas, and allow those ideas to evolve – or die out.

According to Seth Godin, embracing change – or being the change – is the one true way to stay in the game in the first place.

After all, this is the age of: innovate or die! Not to mention the ubiquitous: be remarkable!

In his book SURVIVAL IS NOT ENOUGH, Godin stresses the necessity of evolution and the importance of the fast feedback loop. By making lots of tweaks, experiments, improvements, and little bets, and hooking yourself into a constant loop of constructive criticism that lets you know what works and what doesn’t, so you can keep revising and adjusting accordingly, you rise through the environment as it is now – and not five or ten or fifteen years ago – and influence what it becomes.

You stay relevant and meaningful.

Platform can be a great example of this. Instead of fighting for a narrow slice of your right people, you build out a deeper pie. Your platform forces a constant interaction with your audience; day in, day out, you have to create value – and more value – through your blog posts and tweets and videos. You see which of your ideas hit the ground running, or need more development, or fall by the wayside. Instead of competing with other bloggers, you form partnerships with them – which allow both of you access to each other’s audience and to deepen and increase your readership and the value you put out into the world.

In order to be successful at creating more, you have to follow your strengths and interests.

By ‘strength’, I mean it in the way Marcus Buckingham means it: whatever activity energizes you and makes you feel strong and alive and most like yourself. Identify those moments. Cherish them. Organize your life around them – figure out how to do more of them – and, over time, the dots will start to connect into a skillset uniquely yours.

I like the analogy Sally Hogshead uses in her book FASCINATE. She’s comparing flowers in the Amazon to successful marketing – the ability to fascinate people – but I think it’s a great analogy for thriving in any highly competitive world.

University of Florida biology professor David Dilcher wrote, “flowering plants were the first advertisers in the world. They put out beautiful petals, colorful patterns, fragrances, and gave a reward, such as nectar or pollen, for any insect that would come and visit them.”

Plants offer other lessons in marketing survival. For instance, the Amazon jungle might look like it would be a desirable place to live, if you’re a plant. It’s lush, exotic, flourishing, with plenty of water. But with thirty million species in the rain forest, vegetation grows so thickly that each plant to must fight to gain food, protection, and even a slender ray of light. Plants act like marketing managers: developing unique adaptations, designing spinoff extensions, and seeking unconventional niches.

By listening closely to your environment and playing to your strengths, through constant experimentation and feedback and revision and more experimentation and feedback and revision, you can be abundant.

You can create things and express things that no one’s quite seen before.

You can make more.

stronger for the broken places

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 23:34:25 GMT

When someone treats you badly -- over years -- it leaves you raw and wounded inside. When you've made repeated overtures of peace to that person only to have your head bitten off -- or to be ignored -- sooner or later you have to come to the realization that this person doesn't care about you and probably never really did (and the signs were there from the beginning, if you had known to pay attention and interpret them correctly.) If you once loved this person, and possibly in some corner of yourself still love this person, you need to find your own sense of closure, because there will never -- ever -- be an apology, or any recognition of the damage done.

I let go. I am so done.

Closed.

sexting

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 01:53:22 GMT

I let it slip to a male friend that I thought Andrew Weiner is maybe a sex addict.

“Why?” He immediately seemed on the defensive. “Just because he was sexting? Or because he sent a picture of his – nether regions – to this woman?”

Oh my god, I thought, looking at my friend with bemusement. You have so totally done that.

“Not that I’ve ever done anything like that,” my friend said.

“No,” I said, “because he was so stupid about it.”

Sex addiction is a process addiction, which means that the addict gets his rush off the chemicals -- serotonin, dopamine, adrenaline – that the behavior activates in his own brain. Under this theory, Weiner made his highly questionable use of social media not because he was ignorant of the potential consequences -- but because he was in an altered state.

He was high.

Sending some near-stranger a picture of his underwear-clad erection through a public channel like Twitter no doubt seemed like an excellent idea at the time.

Which is usually how and why a sex addict gets caught – if he gets caught. He (or she) gets careless and leaves something on his cell phone or laptop for someone else to find. If he’s famous and/or wealthy, he leaves himself open to exploitation by the less-than-savory characters he encounters through the Internet.

“But you know what I think?” a girlfriend said to me over dinner at Spago the other night (I had the gnocchi, and it was awesome). “I think 99 percent of all men cheat on their significant others. Don’t you think that?”

“No,” I said.

"well-behaved women seldom make history": redefining what it means to be bad

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 18:34:34 GMT

cross-posted from Tribal Writer

I posed topless for a female photographer who specializes in boudoir. I’m lying on the bed in a man’s velvet smoking jacket, hair blown across my face. I look at the camera. It’s a beautiful portrait (the photographer is very talented) and I’m proud of it. It reminds me slightly of Manet’s Olympia. That painting caused a scandal at the time (1863) — not because the subject was nude — but because of how she stares at the viewer instead of looking away demurely.

It’s that act of shameless eye contact that makes her – according to the moral dictates of the era — truly “bad”.

I once said to someone, “I don’t know if I’m a good girl with a bad streak, or a bad girl with a good streak.” But I was being ironic. My real point was that, like any other woman (or man), I am both and neither.

In fact, it’s kind of amazing to me that the good girl/bad girl dichotomy still exists. It came up again when movie star Reese Witherspoon accepted an award on television and took her speech as an opportunity to slam other, younger women for being “bad”.

“I understand that it’s cool to be bad, I get it,” she said, in that tone of false camaraderie women sometimes use before they slip in the knife. “But it’s possible to make it in Hollywood without being on a reality show….And when I was coming up, a sex tape was something you hid under your bed…And when you take naked pictures of yourself, you hide your face! Hide your face!” She finished off by declaring that she was going to try to make it “cool” to be a “good girl”.

But imagine this:

Instead of criticizing the same young women for the same things that everybody else is already criticizing them for, she could have slammed reality shows for their misogynist (and monotonous) depiction of women.

She could have criticized the kind of media that turns a girl like Paris Hilton into a celebrity in the first place.

She could have pointed out how advertising – which is so very everywhere that we no longer notice it as we’re breathing it in – co-opts rebellion and sells it back to girls in the “you’ve come a long way, baby” pseudo-liberation supposedly found in a package of cigarettes.

She could have criticized a culture that trains girls to define themselves by their sexual appeal only to punish them for it.

She could have echoed Laurel Ulrich’s famous comment that “well-behaved women seldom make history” and pointed out that ‘bad’ doesn’t have to mean shallow and self-destructive. It can mean cutting against the traditional good-girl dictates of passive and pretty and pleasing and quiet. It can mean speaking up against the status quo, the double standard, the beauty myth. It can mean rejecting the idea that your moral nature depends not on what you do, but on what you don’t do (have sex).

It can mean revolution not rebellion.

She could have said: If you’re going to be ‘bad’, make it MEAN SOMETHING…other than self-sabotage. read more at TW

ferocity of soul + a willingness to wander

Wed, 11 May 2011 05:51:20 GMT

cross-posted from www.tribalwriter.com/

“As the late theologian, mystic + Harvard professor Howard Thurman often said, there are two questions that we have to ask ourselves. “The first is ‘Where am I going?’ and the second is ‘Who will go with me?’ If you ever get these questions in the wrong order, you are in trouble.” – Caroline Myss

“We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world.” – Joseph Campbell

When you commit to the life of the creative badass – including your engagement with social media – you’re going on a journey. The ‘journey’ thing might be an overused metaphor – and make you think of Steve Perry telling you to don’t stop believin’ — but that doesn’t make it less apt.

Because social media isn’t a marketing campaign in the traditional sense. It doesn’t begin, blast out a message, and then end six weeks later. You don’t get in and then get out with a happy sense of mission accomplished.

You don’t slap it on your novel like an afterthought. (“My book comes out next week – I better hop on that twittering Tweeter thing!”)

To get anywhere, you have to put one foot in front of the other – one tweet in front of a blog post in front of a status update – day after day after day.

Likewise, creative badassery doesn’t begin and end with a single project, whether it’s a novel or presentation or multimedia art thing or your first startup. It requires long-term vision, ferocity of soul, and a willingness to wander.

That’s where the journey part comes in.

This is the part that no one can teach you. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel – because that would be stupid – but any truly creative life belongs solely to the person living it. It is their soul DNA made manifest, fleshed out with love and blood and sweat and tears and endless hours of deliberate practice, served up to the world with their particular brand of style and savvy. It is the work, but it is also the life. It is the self that knows itself, that has learned to align its values and purpose and passions, its dreams and actions, until the inner life is no longer at war with the outer life.

It knows how to flow with the go.

You’re not just born into this; it’s not like a silver spoon that a few kids get through a happenstance of fate while the rest of us stand in line at Target. The creative life is an achievement that is nonetheless fluid and constantly evolving. You don’t just achieve it once, but over and over again. You have to keep showing up.

The creative life is shaped by creative, adaptive, experimental thinking as opposed to procedural thinking. Peter Sims calls this the “little bets” approach. He uses Chris Rock as an example. When Chris is putting together new material, he goes to a small local club and shows up, unannounced, on the stage. Night after night after night he sits and talks to the audience, making observations and trying out jokes, building on what works and discarding what doesn’t. Instead of writing out an act, and waiting until he decides it’s ‘perfect’ before presenting it to an audience – and risking disaster — Chris makes a series of bets so little that when those bets fail, it’s no big deal. It is, however, a great education.

Sims remarks that

Similar ways of thinking and work methods showed up in the ways that Pixar creates its films…entrepreneurs and savvy CEOs like Jeff Bezos identify and develop new market opportunities…architect Frank Genry designs new buildings…generals go about counterinsurgency strategy and training…stand-up comedians generate new material.

The creative person’s willingness to wander exposes her to new ideas, new experiences and potential interests. Some of these blossom into fascinations and tap into her strengths, and a lot of them don’t. But by making a series of little bets, she can move and feel her way forward into a life that is shaped to her strengths and desires. She can discover her passion: not all at once, but little by little, as she builds on what works for her and discards or minimizes or delegates what doesn’t.

There is no map for your creative life, no step-by-step procedure that someone else can hand down in a book or a blog that will magically reveal to you the meaning of your existence. It could be that the mission of your life is to find your mission, and in that process discover who you are and what you have to give.

It’s not a linear process. You’re allowed to loop back to learn something you might have missed the first time. You can kind of spiral your way forward.

The important thing is to begin the journey.

This can be the tough part. Every journey starts with a separation, a leave-taking, a realization that the place you are right now is a place where you can no longer stay. It might be your hometown, but it could also be a relationship that no longer allows you to grow, friends who don't want you to change (since any change that you make would ripple outwards to them), or a culture or a country or a religion or a profession.

As Carolyn Myss puts it, “You cannot live for prolonged periods of time within the polarity of being true to yourself and needing the approval of others.”

A creative badass must to her own self be true. The irony is that, in the end, this allows her to be more truthful with others. You can’t transcend your desires if you’ve never even learned what they are, or if you’ve never tried for what you want.

Sometimes, in order to find the life you need, you need to leave the life you have – and navigate that uncertain space between. You have to declare yourself. You might have to be solitary for a while. You will encounter doubt and dark nights of the soul (although this would happen anyway). You will have to stand up against conformity and shed your false identity.

You will lose some things, gain others, and find a new tribe.

The tribe of the creative badass.

we shall not cease from exploration

Sat, 07 May 2011 15:03:58 GMT

1

My first baby son Nevada was born on May 18 and died ten weeks later. This is the space of time when his memory for me is especially primal and vivid, experienced on multiple levels. It's tough to explain.

The worst years of my life (in order) would be the year following Nevada's death and then the year following my separation (and, in a distant third, the year of junior high. For is junior high not hell?). What amazes me is that, when I was actually going through these experiences, I thought I was coping just fine. And it's not that I'm not strong and resilient -- if there's one thing I can comfortably say, I am as resilient as hell -- but that the mind has some fierce protective mechanisms, including the ability to deny the depth of what you're feeling.

Now that my life is on solid ground again, the real emotions start to surface. I can allow myself to feel the grief and sadness and anger. Someone once described anger as "hurt pulled inside out" and there is truth to that.

I can also admit to love.

The other morning I was sitting at an outside table at Urth Cafe in Santa Monica with Dude. He was reading the newspaper and I was reading a book called THE HERO WITHIN by Carol S Pearson about archetypes (I have become fascinated with archetypes and how you can tap into that mythic power in your personal life, your creative work, even your social media marketing and branding). And I felt a great sense of contentment, well-being -- a.k.a. 'happy'.

It also reminded me that the happiest moments of my marriage took place in the earlier years, on the Saturday and Sunday mornings when E and I went to the bookstore, then took our purchases to a cafe and read over coffee and just hung out. Somewhere along the line we stopped doing that. Hindsight tells me that our marriage suffered for it. But the ironic thing is, for all the glamour and adventure of the jetset lifestyle, when I think about happiness with him I don't remember the south of France or St Barts or the Google dude's wedding on Richard Branson's private island (in fact, we had wicked fights and I sounded some true depths of misery at all those places). I think about lazily strolling down University Avenue in Palo Alto, our arms around each other's waists, in the sunlight.

So now I am lucky enough to have that again -- with someone else. Which reminds me of the T.S. Eliot quote -- "We shall not cease from exploration/ And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time."

Funny, that.

2

When you first come to Los Angeles, you're completely disoriented: you think it's this massive urban sprawl scattered with palm trees divided by mountains that all looks the same. Spend more time here and you start to recognize it as a group of villages, each with its own personality, tied together with ropes of highway.

The first time Dude and I went to brunch was in Beverly Hills.  "Everybody here," he said, looking around, "is so groomed."

When we went to brunch in Venice some weeks later, I saw what he meant.  Everybody there had this cool, rumpled, disheveled thing going on. ("And you," he reminisced later, "were in a full-on outfit." Yeah, well, habits die hard, although I was glad to let that one go.)

My new house puts me west of the 405 and out of Bel Air. I was meeting with inspectors and general contractors at the property and then driving the long sloping streets down to Sunset.  My first impressions:

1. I will no longer be risking my neck on a daily basis (or scratching up my car) on the blind turns and narrow winding pothole-filled tourist-bus-crawling, sportscar-dive-bombing roads of Bel Air, and

2. Throw a rock and you hit about fifteen yoga studios.

These are not bad things.

i was told there'd be cupcakes

Tue, 03 May 2011 06:42:52 GMT

1

My friends Nia and Sebastian got married before I met them, and I regret that I missed their wedding. It had a space theme. The wedding cake was shaped like a planet. At their anniversary dinner last Friday night, a close friend handed out cupcakes shaped like planets in honor of their cosmic union.

What is this city's obsession with gourmet cupcakes? Bakeries around here are like heads of the hydra. Close one down, and two would spring back in its place. Given the population's ambivalent attitude toward carbs -- or even eating -- it's impressive.

The dinner was held at a restaurant in a hotel in West Hollywood. "What's the dress code?" I asked a friend.

"Given the location, I'd say Hollywood trashy glam."

"Oh, good! It's been so long since I've done Hollywood trashy glam!"

Except we're all grown-ups now, with kids, entering early middle age. Now we wear blazers.

2

Every year my artist friend Chase holds an art show at his house in West Hollywood. It's a charming house that works well as a DIY art gallery, with a deck out back that overlooks the hills. People milled through the rooms and hall and lingered out on the deck, drinking champagne and eating cookies from La Brea Bakery. I eyed one little painting in particular and spoke to Chase about a magazine article I want to write. I am still looking for my central subjects: an attractive professional progressive couple, preferably married, who have opened up their relationship to include other people and would be willing to speak about their experiences and be photographed in a national magazine.

(In my experiences so far, the men are happy and willing to do this. The women? Not so much.)

Chase had a couple in mind, but I had to leave before I could meet them. Drat the luck.

posing with the artist

winners and losers

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 16:59:48 GMT

My twins turned 7 and the consequences were immediate: they are no longer allowed to bring stuffed animals to their father's house.

"It's really annoying," said Jack*.

Quinn was dejected and tearful as I buckled him in the car to go to his dad's without Monkey.

It's not like I always agreed with my ex in the best of times, but I question the purpose of this. Objects like security blankets and stuffed animals are called 'transitional objects' and offer comfort and consistency, especially in new environments (or, say, situations where they're shuttling from one home to another). Children outgrow them and leave them behind. Why can't that process be allowed to happen naturally, according to the child's unique evolution?

It's no secret -- since he has been profiled in everything from the New Yorker to Wired -- that my ex grew up in a male-dominated family in a male-dominated culture (South Africa) and works in male-dominated industries. He lives in a highly competitive world ("people play dirty," he told me once, "because they think they're going to die") and he's done very well in it.

But I don't want to see any child shoehorned into a definition of masculinity that forbids him to flourish as himself. It's why, when I saw my ex give a little speech that went along the lines of, "Quinn, in this world you can be a winner or a loser. Do you want to be a winner or a loser?" I lifted my hands and gave his new wife a WTF? expression.

Life is not a zero-sum game, even if business often is. I want my boys to maintain strong boundaries, yes, and be savvy, and not be ruthlessly taken advantage of, but at the same time to come at the world through service and soul. Elevate yourself by elevating others. Add value to the pie and make it bigger. Learn that failure doesn't make you a loser but is part of the learning process (and people who fear failure hold themselves back from their own potential, since growth demands errors and mistakes). Stuff like that. We live in new, interconnected times; we are wired into each other like never before; the division of public and private is transforming into something much more transparent. Acts of aggression that cause hurt, anger and resentment can come back to bite you in the ass. It's better to seduce instead of conquer.

I do not think this is naive, or a sign that I am weak. I have a fire in me and can take it to the mat when I have to.

* I'm using pseudonyms, obviously

life imitating reality TV imitating life. or something.

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 20:18:01 GMT

Last night I hosted an engagement party for my friend Phineas*, a gifted and award-winning photographer who does these INSANE 90-day treks through the north and south poles to take pictures of the melting glaciers. He's worldly and attractive with a killer British accent, and has the kind of romantic past that involves German models. There's a deference and humility to him. His cousin is an international movie star and his father a famous conductor, so his frame of reference about what it means to be accomplished is, shall we say, a bit skewed.

I had one of those it's-a-small-world moments when one of Phineas's friends showing up at my house turned out to be Eric, whom I've known for ten years and, now, seem to be connected to through about a million people. (His reaction was kind of the same. "The invite was a double whammy," he reported. "It was like -- holy crap! Phineas is getting married! And then: holy crap! It's at Justine's house!")

Another guest I instantly recognized. "Rafe," I said, and held out my hand. "Hello!"

I could see him trying to figure out how we knew each other.

"We've never met," I assured him. "I saw you on The Millionaire Matchmaker."

Rafe was one of the millionaires "looking for love" ("I did it for charity," he said, and indeed, made an active effort to highlight a nonprofit on the show, which did not go over well with either his date or the Matchmaker herself, Patti Stanger). He is a friend of both Phineas and Dude, and Dude and I had watched that episode together while Dude texted Rafe our reactions (Rafe was in England at the time). Just like he'd been on the show, Rafe -- a successful Hollywood director -- was amusing, intelligent, and verbal, very much a storyteller. We compared notes (I was recently on television), and Rafe talked about a friend of his in D.C. whose wife had agreed to star in The Real Housewives of Washington D.C. They ended up getting divorced in the second season. That, we agreed, topped both our experiences in terms of both trauma and horror.

It struck me as a conversation you can probably only have in LA.

It was a fun, interesting, creative crowd. "Half of them don't have two nickels to rub together," Dude observed at one point, "and the other half are millionaires."

After the party, Dude and I hung out in the kitchen and talked with Phineas and his tall blonde European fiancee Greta, who looks like a model but is actually an M.D. There was another guy hanging out with us. He didn't say much. Phineas seemed to know him. I gave him friendly glances and kept wondering: was he a guest? or one of the caterers, waiting for us to get out of the way so he could finish his job? or a total stranger who had wandered in through an open French door?

Finally he introduced himself. "My name is Nick."

He was indeed a guest.

"For a minute there I felt like I was in a movie," Nick said. "I'm, you know, the quiet guy that nobody knows who he is."

I like a man with a sense of the meta.

*This is the first time I've had to give someone a pseudonym not just for the sake of privacy, but because I've already used his real name as somebody else's fake name.

heathcliff was a psycho

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 14:27:21 GMT

1

A Facebook friend drew my attention to this lovely project on Kickstarter.com, by two young female artists:

Dreamscape Memory Cave

I love the ideas they're working with, so I pledged a few dollars and brought them closer to their $2000.00 goal. Check it out. Help them if you can. They might make you a chandelier.

(I am becoming fascinated with chandeliers.)

2

I had dinner with my great friend Nia who recently saw the new movie JANE EYRE.

"I had some serious problems with Rochester," she said.

She wasn't talking about the actor.

"That whole Byronic hero thing," she continued. "I was into it when I was younger, but now it turns me off. It doesn't translate well to life."

"Heathcliff," I agreed, referencing a different novel entirely but eager to make my point, "was a psycho."

We're talking about a character who kills his new wife's dog just to torment her because she isn't Catherine. (This is how I remember it, anyway.) That is not romantic. Cruelty to animals is one of the signs of a potential serial killer*.

Nia said, "I don't want to impose contemporary values on, you know, a different historical period, but I was watching the movie and I thought -- Am I the only one bothered by the fact that he locked this woman in the attic?"

"Have you read --"

"I mean, he locked her in the attic."

" -- WIDE SARGASSO SEA?" It's a slender novel of gorgeousness written by Jean Rhys, imagining the story of the "mad" wife Bertha: where she came from, how her relationship with Rochester developed including how she got to be in Rochester's attic. You can probably tell that it does not end happily.

We talked for a bit, and I said, "It kind of disturbs me now about how it didn't disturb me then when I read the book in my teens, and then again in college. I was just completely accepting of the whole situation. But all we have is Rochester's word that she was insane to begin with, and guys can be so quick to call a woman crazy. It can be very convenient for them. And of course she was dangerous and pissed off. Who wouldn't be, in her situation?" For all we know, the woman just wanted to go shopping.

One of the things a smart girl is supposed to do when considering a guy's boyfriend potential, is to look at the way he treats the women in his life: mother, sisters if he has any, female friends if he has any (and if he doesn't, that's not a good sign), and especially ex-girlfriends. The idea being: how a guy talks about his ex is the way he will one day talk about you.**

So a guy who is on good terms with his exes is generally an excellent find. It means he treated them well, broke up well, and gave them no reason to actively hate him. A guy who refers to his exes as "crazy" or "psycho" or "bitches" should send up a major red flag. Chances are he is a) attracted to psychos, which means you should probably question why he's with you, or b) he has no respect for women and takes no accountability for the part that he played in the apparently destructive dynamic between them, which does not bode well for the dynamic that he will develop with you.

So if Jane and Rochester were chatting each other up at a local Starbucks -- shooting the breeze, getting to know each other -- and Rochester were to let it slip that, well, yeah, technically he's married, but his wife doesn't understand him because she's such a psycho, and even though they live together they don't really live together because, you know, he locked her in the attic, which means he's totally free to see other people and so, hey, how about dinner and a movie....

Jane should say no. Or use him for sex and then dump his ass.

* together with arson and bedwetting: the childhood unholy triad that could signal a potential sociopath. (The bedwetting part I don't really get.) (Edited to add: a wise person in the comment section below has pointed out that not all sociopaths become serial killers. Some of them go into politics. Or corporate life, for that matter.)

** My very wise, older friend M. once said to me, "I think there should be a rule. No woman should marry a man before she has a serious conversation with his ex-wife, who knows him better than anyone."

"I'm an ex-wife," I pointed out, "and we have no credibility. We're, you know, all bitter and crazy and shit."

"Not all of you," M said.

the yin and the yang

Sun, 03 Apr 2011 18:18:43 GMT

1

My friend Genevieve came over the other night. "I need your moral support with something," she said in a note sent through Facebook. "Not a man thing."

I was very curious.

I love to be in the company of very smart, worldly, accomplished older women. When you're coming up on 40 (I am 38 and a half), a birthday that someone once described as "the old age of youth and the youth of old age", it can seem a bit like coming to the edge of a cliff with nothing but this obscured, smoggy space ahead. But then you put yourself in the presence of these remarkable women and it's like a friendly smack. It's a reality check, a voice piping up to ask: was it really all that stimulating to be an arm ornament, or decorative wallpaper? and isn't it kind of awesome to know that your pregnancies are all behind you? and isn't it exciting to learn from your old mistakes? Now you can go and make new ones!

But I suppose in some ways it's not all that different from the trauma of about-to-turn-30. You get so wrapped up in the death of one era, you forget that it's also the birth of something new. The challenge is, do you allow yourself to move forward, embrace change, and let yourself evolve, or try to freeze yourself in the amber of the past? The latter seems a tragic failure of imagination.

It turns out that Genevieve's husband went to France and sent her an email to let her know that he bought a chateau. It was such a great find that he couldn't pass it up. Since they were transitioning out of their Malibu home anyway, it makes sense to spend part of the year in France (Genevieve speaks fluent French, and her work takes her all over the world).

She showed me pictures of the place, and of course it's beautiful. My favorite detail was a big white spot on the ceiling of one room where a bomb once went off. "It went up through the roof and made this hole," Genevieve told me. "When they restored the room, they left that white circle. Do you think we should fix it or leave it there?"

"Leave it there."

Then I said, musingly, "You know, my father once bought a motorcycle without telling my mother. This seems a bit like that. Only different."

2

Speaking of homes, there's one I have my eye on. I might let myself fall in love with it, if it doesn't prove emotionally unavailable.

"But it's not cozy," complained my boyfriend.

"You haven't even seen it."

"I've seen pictures of it. I thought you wanted something cozy."

"I want something that has enough space for five or six* kids and that I don't hate," I said. "I can make it cozy."

(I look forward to decorating. I don't plan on any major change, just taking the furniture and objects I already have and injecting a kind of gypset, rock'n'roll element that my ex-husband would probably have hated.)

3

So I walk through these rooms and hallways, absorb the views from all the windows. What an amazing place to live. This house has held a negative charge for me. But now I can appreciate it, and start to miss it.

The universe needs the conflict of contrasts in order to keep moving forward. There's no light without the dark. In the end, it's all part of the same bigger picture.

The death of one thing.

The birth of something else.

* Dude has a young son whom my sons adore

home is where the heart is (especially when properly priced)

Sat, 02 Apr 2011 19:11:39 GMT

1

Now seems a good time to once again change the name of this blog. Little did I know, when I started it five or six years ago, the kind of trouble that it might get me into. C'est la vie. Je ne regrette rien.

I've thought about closing it down and/or melding it into Tribal Writer, but no. If a blog can be a kind of quest -- for knowledge, identity, meaning -- then this blog and I are at the start of something new. The re-invention of a life, the world post-divorce, the next, new act. The claiming (or reclaiming) of personal power. The desire to be fearless, bold, and balls-out -- even if, afterward, I must curl up in the fetal position.

2

We don't really talk about money in this culture. We don't really talk about class.

I believe that the stuff we keep in the dark is the stuff that grows a dark power over us.

There's a difference between a high-consumption lifestyle and a wealth-creating lifestyle. Many people choose the first at the expense of the second: big house, fancy cars, little saved and/or invested. I spent a few years in the world of what Thomas J Stanley calls "the glittering rich": people who can actually afford to consume outrageously while still creating wealth (sometimes without even trying). Due to a document I signed at the beginning of my marriage, I had no say in family finances, no access to capital, no ability to make major purchases. I had a monthly allowance. Since finance bored me, and I don't have a talent for numbers*, I was willing to co-create this situation and live in it and focus on other things (babies, books, blogging and a social life). Can we say stupid, boys and girls? After the separation I got depressed and stressed and careless with my credit rating. Can we say even stupider?

But it is what it is.

Since my separation I've discovered a small body of literature about women and their troubled, ambivalent attitude toward personal finance (in particular I recommend Liz Perle's MONEY, A MEMOIR: Women, Emotions and Cash and anything by Barbara Stanny). The first thing that's necessary for anyone to do to get a financial clue is assume responsibility for their own situation. You must eject any and all fantasies of something that's going to save you, whether it's Prince Charming or a winning lottery ticket or (*awkward cough*) a generous settlement.

"Don't think of it as downsizing," Billy told me. "Think of it as right-sizing."

Billy is my financial advisor and investments guy. He wears baseball caps, goes to rock concerts, and has large, very blue, sympathetic eyes. (It can be distracting. In conversation with him I will lose my train of thought and think, Wow. He has these large, very blue, sympathetic eyes.) He connected me to the elegant, grandfatherly Keaton, who is now my business manager.** After the divorce settled and the transfer of property took place (including the property tax bill my ex immediately sent me), they plunked me down in a conference room and said, "You have to fire half your domestic staff and sell your house."

"Oh," I said.

Your house is the biggest predictor of your future spending, according to the neighborhood you live in and the Jonses you try to keep up with. The prudent situation is to find an area where you can afford the most expensive house on the block. Suffice to say, that area, for me, is not Bel Air, where my one neighbor has an empire of around $300 million (if he can manage to stay out of jail) and my other neighbor has been world-famous since the age of 20 and has a bedroom in his house meant for Oprah when she visits (he calls it "Oprah's room"). The property tax alone is more than double what the average American makes in a year.

I need to get my ass out of glittering Bel Air and into a nice, upper-class neighborhood where it belongs.

So I said, "Okay. Let's sell this mofo."

Enter Janice, who sells real estate with a partner who is also named Janice.

This means you can refer to them as "The Janices". This is convenient.

The biggest mistake people make, the Janices told me, is to fail to be realistic and overprice their home**.

"When a house is properly priced," they said, "it should sell within the first two weeks."

If it's overpriced, it sits on the market and sits on the market and continues to lose perceived-value until you end up with an offer that's often lower than the offer you would have gotten if you'd priced it properly in the first place.

We slapped a number on the house that was in line with a recent appraisal.

It sold to a nice young man from the east coast who plans to use it as a second home.

So my to-do list now includes: Work on novel. Organize rotating menu of kids' meals. Get new freaking house.

* two excuses women often make when choosing to live in a kind of financial smog

**Turns out he also works for my actress friend I used to blog about who was dating an international pop star. She has since married the pop star, gone to live in his home country, and become a figure of mystery (ie: she's more or less disappeared). I suppose that happens. I miss her.

*** Probably for the same reason people hold on to losing stocks too long. Unless you're selling right at that moment when the house is at peak value, it's tough to accept the fact that you're taking a loss, even if that 'loss' is just in your head. My house sold for more than what we paid for it, and several million dollars less than the peak value claimed in certain articles and divorce documents.

mistakes were made. lessons were learned.*

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 00:13:52 GMT

There's a story in the New York Post saying that Elon and I settled for a "post-nup pay-out" of $750,000. I have no idea where they got this number but it's not true. Elon and I came to terms a while ago because an ending seemed the sensible thing (the appeals court agreed to hear the case, but at some point the madness must stop, and this could have gone on for years). I received the house, which I'm in the process of selling, two million cash minus the legal fees that I was responsible for, alimony and child support for 17 years (about $80,000** a month), no stock, and a Tesla Roadster which I still need to go down to the store and order. This deal is about ten or so million dollars less (mostly in terms of alimony) than what Elon had offered to me before the trial. I am happy and moving on (... and into a cozier house). Elon and I seem to be at the cautious beginnings of a new kind of relationship. Knock wood.

I am blogging this to head off the inaccuracies and misperceptions that, I've learned, would otherwise be reported in one form or another (the corrections of which were the reason I started blogging about the divorce process in the first place). The $750,000 thing completely boondoggled me. Also, an interview I did last fall for a then-untitled documentary about the business*** side of high-profile divorces (...what can I say? it seemed a good idea at the time...) is airing tonight.

* I thought about calling this post 'Golddigger 2', but since that title got me in trouble the first time, and irony doesn't always carry well...

** To quote from a reply I made to someone in the comments section below, because doubtless she's not the only one to think this and so I might as well address it here:

Yes, big wealth, big numbers. I understand why people would resent that...Although to put it in a certain kind of perspective -- Charlie Sheen is reportedly paying $55,000/month child support for two kids. So leaving out the question of alimony entirely, which the sum does contain, $80,000 for five kids is not such a bad deal *in this particular context* of a billionaire father.

The fact that $80,000 is more than most people make in a year is a) very true and b) not relevant to what my own ex-husband should or should not pay in child support, according to *his* responsibilities and capabilities which is to maintain a roughly equal standard of living at both households (and if it makes you feel any better my standard of living will *not* include the private jet and massive mansion that my ex enjoys)....for the benefit of the kids. Not the wife. The kids, which is why child support eventually comes to an end.

*** It's been interesting to muse on the whole golddigger thing, how swiftly women are demonized in this culture, regarded as vile and beneath contempt, and how quickly people link female sexuality to commerce and morality (as evidenced by the many comments left on certain posts in this blog). It's been interesting to reflect on this entire experience in general, which lasted two and a half years (and went public last June). It's been interesting to think about the things about marriage that no one ever tells you, much less prepares you for, and how damaging the fairy tale idea of love-as-rescue truly is, how it seeps into our brains and can fuck us up when we're not careful. It's been interesting to think about how money turns into a symbol for so many other things, and how men and women relate to it differently. It's been interesting to ponder the ancient double standards and hypocrisies that shoot through the heart of our culture. No one is coming to save us, and that is as it should be. We are the ones we've been waiting for. And on that note, peace out.

how to quit procrastinating & start (or finish) your damn novel

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 19:04:41 GMT

cross-posted from Tribal Writer

apologies for my absence. will be posting again regularly very soon.

1

A few weeks ago, a woman named Marie Forleo surprised about eighteen other women and me with a boudoir photo session. We were all solo entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs gathered for a three day retreat in Santa Monica. You wouldn’t think that posing in lingerie (or nothing at all) has anything to do with learning about online marketing, but Marie’s larger point was this: just because things aren’t perfect isn’t a reason not to just do it, as Nike likes to say. If your hair needs washing, your feet need a pedicure, and you would like to lose five pounds: well, so what. Still no time like the present.

Not long after that, I listened to the writer/activist Eve Ensler talk about her work in the Congo, where she and her organization, V-Day, built the City of Joy. City of Joy is a community that shelters and trains female survivors of sexual violence (I was in Congo to witness the opening of the City, and it was one of the most profound moments of my life). Eve mentioned the people who tried to discourage her, who said that the Congo is the Congo and will never change, the country’s wounds are too deep and vast. But she went, and she built this place, and now there’s a burgeoning movement not just of women, but men (V-Men) who support them.

“Just do something,” Eve told us. “No matter how overwhelming the situation might seem, just do something. There’s power in that, because one action can lead to another action, and once you do something, someone else will do something, and then someone else will do something, and so on and so on. You don’t know what will happen, or what you could start.”

I was having trouble starting a new section of my novel-in-progress. I told myself it was because it needed some incubation, but the truth was: I wanted the draft to be perfect, and I was overwhelming myself with everything I wanted the novel to accomplish.

Never mind the fact that it was a first draft, which is supposed to be imperfect.

Never mind that I had forgotten one of the basic laws of creativity: there is always something in the box.

This is a phrase I took from the book IMPROV WISDOM – a great little book – which warns you not to overprepare, but to pay attention to the moment, to prepare only to be surprised. The book suggests an exercise in which you close your eyes and imagine a gift-wrapped box. Imagine yourself taking the lid off the box, reaching inside and finding – what? What do you find? What do you pull out of the box?

I myself found a statue of a Chinese horse, but that’s not the point. Your mind will offer up its gifts. Your mind won’t let you starve. It will feed you richly.

You only have to start.

If you’re anxious – and what is beneath procrastination if not anxiety – it helps to do what Eric Maisel calls hushing the mind. Sloooooow everything down. Breathe deep. Downshift those brainwaves into creative mode. When you’re in thought overwhelm, it’s way too easy to freak yourself out and go watch Real Housewives instead.

Empty your mind.

Do a brain dump on paper of all the things that are bothering you, all those pesky tasks you still need to complete. Get them out of your head. Clear that mental space for other, more creative thoughts. There’s always something in the box, but it helps to get rid of the junk.

Create a ritual that will shift you from the everyday-state into creative-state. Rituals are powerful because of the way they wire certain actions together, so that once you start one thing (just start!), you’ll move automatically into the next action, into the next action, and then suddenly you’re working on your novel. No drama. A ritual is like a willpower shortcut. You only need the willpower to do that first, simple thing – lighting a candle, or putting on a certain playlist, or tidying your desk – and the ritual will flow you through the rest.

Small actions are important, because they cannily sidestep that primitive part of your mind that senses change, or difficult task ahead, and so slams on the brakes and spins you toward some stress-relieving activity. Like shopping. You can use the power of small by setting small goals for yourself. Micro-goals. Five words of your novel everyday for thirty days. Five words? The brain laughs, but sits at the desk and meets that goal and feels the thrill of satisfaction, closing the loop, and so does it again the next day, and the next day, until three, four weeks have slipped by and sitting down at your desk to write everyday has become a habit. The principle behind this is called kaizen, the Japanese word for progress through tiny but steady improvements.

If I know you – and I don’t, except I do – there’s that book you want to write, or need to finish, but you don’t think you know how. You tell yourself it’s not the right time. You tell yourself you’ll get around to it tomorrow. You tell yourself this because if you think too much about the book, your thoughts crowd your head until you can’t think at all.

But a good friend once told me this, and I pass it on to you:

Everything you need to know is already inside you.

It doesn’t have to be perfect. It does have to get out of your head, to manifest, so that you can work it, and pay attention to it, and follow where it leads.

One small act of creativity begets another small act of creativity, like links in a chain leading all the way to a finished draft.

Breathe deep. Hush your mind.

Prepare to be surprised. You don’t know what could happen, or what you could start.

So go ahead.

Open the box.

fiction is important. dammit.

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 21:57:23 GMT

cross-posted from Tribal Writer

1

Most aspiring fiction writers don’t read enough fiction, which is like a fighter going into the ring with one hand tied behind her back. The game is over before it started. I’ve written about this before – Reading is the Inhale, Writing is the Exhale: Developing Writer’s Intuition – and posted about it in various places and forums over the years, and I always encounter resistance (generally from aspiring fiction writers who don’t read enough).

But this isn’t surprising, since the culture itself delivers deeply mixed messages about the importance of fiction. Parents tell their kids to read books, because we all know that reading is good for you, and makes you smarter, but when the kids look to the parents to see what the parents are doing, they are…generally not reading novels. (They might even be trying to ban the novels that they’re not actually reading.)

Part of this has to do with the way reading is taught in schools, which often works to destroy the very pleasure principle that drives us to do what we do. Studies have shown that extrinsic motivation (offering someone a reward, such as a prize or a good grade) tends to destroy intrinsic motivation (the desire to do the activity simply for the sake of doing the activity), which worsens performance instead of improving it.

And part of this has to do with the fact that the culture doesn’t really understand the point of reading fiction. We prize efficiency, productivity, quantitative results, and ‘being busy’. Fiction seems too self-indulgent, so we tend to say, I just don’t have the time for it. (We do, however, have the time to watch hours of television a day, or go shopping, or aimlessly surf the Web, but whatever.)

We tend to say: I like to read books that actually teach me something.

Because in the end, what does fiction actually do for us? What’s the ROI? It’s not like it actually teaches us anything, or improves our lives in some measurable way…right?

The irony is that we are hardwired for narrative. We consume stories. We hunger for them, we gobble them up, we look for more. Television shows were invented solely to keep enough of us in one place long enough so that advertisers could sell us stuff that we don’t need and were doing fine without. Stories can be scripted – like LOST – or unscripted – like THE BACHELOR, or when Brad dumped Jennifer for Angelina, it doesn’t matter.

The brain is a funny thing. It doesn’t always distinguish between reality and the simulation of a reality. On some level, the brain doesn’t even distinguish between your friends and your favorite imaginary characters. (This might be why, when the 1980s show FAME killed off Nicole, I broke down and bawled like a baby. I was maybe twelve or thirteen at the time. This might also be why, in Victorian times, crowds swarmed the docks when the boats came in carrying the latest edition of Charles Dickens' serial novel. They cried out, “Is Nell dead?” and when the answer came back ‘yes’, there was weeping and hysteria.)

In fact, when you read about a character performing an action, your brain responds as if you were performing that action yourself. In so doing, your brain absorbs that experience as if it were your own and files it away in that repository of knowledge it can draw on in the future.

There is a survival benefit to this.

Say I’m a caveman, and you’re a caveman, and you come back to the cave one day saying, Dude! I ran into this huge hulking beast with teeth that are like THIS BIG and it seriously tried to eat my head, and I had to run up into a tree and hide until it went away and I needed to piss like a racehorse. Maybe I’ve never seen such a creature before, or even known that it existed, but by absorbing your story I absorb your experience and thus enlarge the field of my own. The next time I leave the cave, I know to keep my eyes peeled for the huge hulking beast, and to hide in a tree if it attacks me.

Even our fascination with celebrities – the stories of their lives – can be traced to evolutionary advantage. Humans are social animals, and it seems to be the way of things for the less powerful to study the powerful, and for the powerful to ignore everybody but their peers. By studying those who influence and rule us, we could figure out how to navigate their routines and personalities so that we could, maybe, poach a mate or steal some food or copy their tactics or in some way advance our own situation.

Narrative organizes information and allows us to remember it. It’s also through narrative that we impart meaning and value to events. In this way we do more than tell stories; we co-create the very reality that we live in. As any number of self-help books will tell you, if you want to change your life, you have to change yourself, and if you want to change the way you see yourself, you need to change the story that you tell yourself about yourself. Either your story empowers you – or it dooms you (a.k.a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’).

We can not only use stories to transform ourselves, but to change others: to impact the way they see the world, to alter their own co-created reality.

Because here’s the thing. We are not the rational creatures we would like to think of ourselves as being. If we made rational decisions for rational reasons, Americans wouldn’t be nearly so overweight, addicted, or in debt as we are (and we are more these things than we’ve ever been in history). Our neocortex – that top layer of brain that enables self-awareness – is a relatively recent development. Our limbic brain (the middle, mammalian brain that runs on emotion) is much older and our reptilian brain (the bottom, primitive brain that runs on instinct) is older still. They’ve had a lot more time to figure out how to get what they want, which means our so-called ‘rational’ brain often gets co-opted, manipulated and overruled.

So in order to truly get through to another person, you have to enlist their emotional as well as their rational brain.

You have to charge your argument, your ideas, with emotion.

What better way to do this than through stories?

– to be continued —

image by Sophie Phelps

pain to power, part one

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 12:10:25 GMT

1

It's ten to three in the morning and I am jet-lagged and wired from my trip. Returned to Los Angeles in the early evening. Reunited with my boys (who were back from their father's).

This trip stands alone. It was a singular experience. I am still processing.

I met Dude in D.C. and then we continued to Brussels and then to Burundi in what Dude referred to as "a colonial puddle-jumper." (Congo was colonized by the Belgians, who -- like so many others -- lusted for its woods, its minerals.) We landed at a small, humble airport and started to mingle with the rest of our group, which had gathered from around the world and included celebrities Rosario Dawson, Thandie Newton and Charlize Theron. We were all here to witness the opening ceremonies of the City of Joy, spearheaded by the phenomenal writer-activist Eve Ensler. We were all donors, supporters, and Eve would later say that she wanted us to be "a family".

That night we hung out at Hotel Tanganyika. We sat poolside and ordered off the menu -- pizza, cheeseburgers, chicken kebabs -- and introduced ourselves to each other. A lot of people already seemed to know each other; I watched the warm embraces, happy cries of hello hello, and had that new-kid-in-school kind of feeling. "It's a tribe," Dude said to me. "It's the Vday tribe."

Then Christine Schuler Deschryver came out to greet us. The daughter of a Belgian man and Congolese woman, Christine is a tall striking woman with a magnificent presence. She and Eve had worked together to bring the City to fruition. Eve followed Christine's words with some words of her own, encouraging us to "surrender" to our experience in the Congo, where electricity and running water and Internet access tend to come and go of their own accord (assuming you're one of the lucky ones to have it at all). "It's anarchy," she said, "but it's beautiful anarchy...There's no plan. We told you there's a plan, we sent you that agenda, but that was just to make you feel better. There's no plan." Laughter in the humid, falling dark. Eve also expressed her love for and commitment to the Congolese women, and how moved she was that we had come so far to support them.

The philosophy behind City of Joy is turning pain to power. These are women who have been raped in the most extreme ways possible: gang-raped (sometimes more than once), raped with guns and sticks, their insides shredded, their bodies mutilated. These are women who have lost all of their children, watched them hacked to death by rebels, gunboys.

And yet, Eve said, "they dance."

2

I first came into contact with Vday when I went to see a staged reading of Eve's play O.P.C., an event that was sponsored by Dude's environmental organization Global Green USA. Still dazed and raw from certain events in my personal life, I found that night to be a turning point and would refer to it in the article I wrote for Marie Claire a full year later. What I didn't mention in the article was that, after the reading -- which was intelligent, knowing, profoundly moving, and hysterically funny (there's a scene involving Prada boots that had me cracking up in the aisle) -- Dude joined Eve onstage for a moderated discussion that drew parallels between the exploitation and commodification of the earth, and the exploitation and commodification of women. They also spoke about the need for men to step up and join the fight to end the violence against women who are, after all, their sisters, mothers, girlfriends, wives (and, I would like to think, their friends).

I had no idea that that night would eventually lead me to the Congo. I did sense, at least on some level, that I had discovered -- or rediscovered -- something that I hadn't even known I'd been looking for, or hadn't even realized I'd lost. Sometimes knowledge comes in flashes, images, in felt and nonverbal forms. All you can do is respect it -- know enough not to dismiss it -- and give it space to unfold, to grow.

(This was also the moment when I looked at Dude onstage -- we had been dating casually for several months by this point -- and realized, Wow. I could totally fall in love with that guy. )

in Africa

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 06:55:57 GMT

Quick note: I am currently in Burundi with Dude and Vday organization (the "global movement to end violence against girls and women"). We are about to drive through Rwanda to Congo, to witness the opening ceremonies of City of Joy, a sustainable community for girls and women.

When I was checking in at Los Angeles Airport, and trying to check my bag all the way through from LA to DC to Brussels to Burundi (it took a long-ass time to get here), the woman behind the counter looked up at me with a blank expression on her face. "Where did you say you were going?"

"Bujumbura."

"Bu -- what?"

"Bujumbura."

"I've never heard of -- How do you spell it?"

"B-U-J-U-M-B-U-R-A."

"Okay." She tapped away on her keyboard, handed me my boarding pass and said, "Have a good trip to -- to -- to whatever that city is you said you were going."

creative badass manifesto (a work in progress)

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 00:50:01 GMT

cross-posted from Tribal Writer

1. Live for the process

(that's how you lose yourself & find your best work)

When we focus on the process instead of the end result, we're more likely to reach flow. Otherwise known as being "in the zone", flow is a state of mind in which we lose all sense of self-consciousness and lock in on the task at hand. When we're in flow, we are...better. More focused, more creative, more skilled. It's when we do our best work, and grow toward new capabilities.

2. Give it away

(so they can't live without it)

Seth Godin writes in LINCHPIN: "...the real magic is the leverage this expansion adds, not the loss of commerce it causes. When you have more friends in the core circle, more people with whom to share your art, your art is amplified and can have more power."

Russell Simmons dedicates a chapter to this idea in his new book SUPER RICH: "...the best way to get a [record] deal is to forget about the labels and instead just start giving away your music for free...Never pass up any opportunity to share your gift with the world...[The labels are] going to want to find the person who's generating much love and enthusiasm. And when they find you, they're going to reward you...more handsomely than if you had come to them begging for a deal."

3. Work your ass off

(baby, you've got to ship)

The more blog posts you write, the better chance you have of writing one that goes viral. The more stories you write, the more paintings you paint, the more companies you dream up: not only will you develop your voice and improve at whatever it is that you do, you increase your own chances of success.

Obviously you don't want to sacrifice quality for quantity. You need instruction, feedback, the tough love of intelligent constructive criticism: fold all of this into your process. And then work it.

4. Tell the truth

(truth is beauty & power)

Telling the truth is about paying close attention to your own strengths and interests instead of just chasing the marketplace. It's about speaking in your own voice. When you tell the truth - your truth - you infuse your work with soul and originality. And because it's truth, it will resonate with others. People will find you unique, but still be able to relate. They might even feel like you're speaking their own truth in a way that they can't, or didn't even know to do.

That's powerful stuff.

5. Follow your instincts

(they know more than you do)

Howard Gardner put forward the idea of multiple intelligences, some of which are nonverbal. Scientists have discovered that neural intelligence doesn't just exist in the brain, but also in the body: your heart, your gut. Your intelligence is more complex and complicated than you probably think, and it is constantly absorbing and processing information on an unconscious level. Intuition is a form of nonverbal intelligence, and it's not just women who have it. Pay attention to it.

6. Be vulnerable

(you connect when you're authentic)

To produce good work, you need to dive beneath the surface of things. You need to "go there" in a way that we specifically train ourselves not to do in day-to-day life. We believe that if we reveal too much, we'll expose ourselves as unworthy. Shameful. But it's shame that keeps us isolated, silent, and disconnected from each other. Part of believing that you have something to say is flying in the face of all that. When you lean into what discomforts you, what scares you, you're getting to the good, original stuff.

Hey. If it was easy, then everybody would do it. And do it well.

7. Know yourself

(play to your strengths)

When you know yourself, you can figure out how to play to your strengths and navigate your weaknesses. Your strengths are the things that make you feel rejuvenated and powerful , not necessarily what you're already good at. (You might be good at accounting. That doesn't mean it fills you with a zest for life.) By cultivating your strengths, you can lose yourself in the process (see #1) and get better and better and better at specific things until no one can deny how freaking remarkable you are. If you are a writer with a strength for plotting, you might produce the next bestselling thriller. Or if your strengths are for prose and character, you might develop into the next prize-winning literary short-story writer.

8. Love the world

(makes you healthier & more creative)

Hate and bitterness are unproductive. Hate destroys and contracts; love builds and expands. Be a builder. Much more fun that way. We only have so much attention to put on the world; put yours on what you love. Let the rest fade into the background.

9. Value stillness

(that's where ideas live)

When you slow down your brainwaves, you literally downshift into a very different state of mind. Day-to-day life requires us to be alert and vigilant in a way that is not conducive to creativity. To create, you want to access the deeper, more unconscious parts of your intelligence. You want to let your mind roam freely to make new connections, factor in new bits of information, find new relationships between them. It's why daydreaming is linked to creativity. It's why Einstein believed in taking lots of naps. It's why meditation is a force of good. You've got to let your brain out of its practical, everyday cage.

10. Make mistakes

(the real art grows out of them)

Give yourself permission to make mistakes. The best and fastest way to get better at anything is through something called deliberate practice, which requires (among other things) that you work at the limit of your abilities. When you make mistakes, your brain is forced to slow down, pay attention, and process what you did wrong. This is how we learn.

Not to mention, sometimes the mistakes can spark off new insights and directions of their own.

11. Get open

(let the world in)

'Get open' is a hip-hop phrase that I picked up from Russell Simmons: it means "losing your inhibitions, or letting down your defenses...You want to always be as open, creative and fluid as possible, and never become rigid, old, or tight. The freedom you experience when you're open is where all the positive change in your life will emanate from." Amen.

12. Remember that we are stronger for the broken places.

Every scar has a story behind it. Tell yours with pride.

review of JUST KIDS (by Patti Smith)

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 16:39:06 GMT

cross-posted from Goodreads

JUST KIDS is Patti Smith's haunting elegy to her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe as well as a vibrant personal document of New York in the 60s and 70s. Andy Warhol ruled and Janis Joplin wrote songs at the Chelsea and America lost its supposed innocence to the sounds of warfare in Vietnam that would also erupt at home, civil unrest and the Kent State shootings.

Patti Smith was twenty years old, penniless and drifting through the neighborhoods of New York when she encountered a dark-eyed, curly-haired Robert Mapplethorpe: a mash-up of talent, ambition and sexual magnetism in his self-made beaded necklaces and sheepskin vest. Both of them were aspiring artists who had escaped conventional upbringings and embarked on the tricky work of inventing themselves. With each other as witness, muse and helpmeet, Patti and Robert defined the vocabularies that would in turn -- and time -- define them. They found themselves at a stunning crossroads of artistic characters who inspired and encouraged them while opening up social vistas that would benefit their work (Robert in particular was socially ambitious, hungering for "high art and high society"). They were the favored children of a particular time and place; what happened to them here could not have happened to them elsewhere.

JUST KIDS is one of those books where the reader knows things that the young characters don't -- impending fame and Robert's death by AIDS -- in a way that creates within the narrative a sense of suspense, a compelling thread of destiny, that might otherwise be lacking. Patti is an engaging heroine, wildly idealistic and rebellious and daring ("Jesus died for somebody's sins/But not mine"), in love with art for the sake of art and attaining worldly success almost in spite of herself (says Robert, "Patti, you got famous before me"). Robert is vividly drawn, anguishing over his sexual identity even as he finds an unapologetic beauty in extreme sexual acts and makes work that sometimes disturbs even Patti. This might seem a contradiction in terms, but as Patti herself points out, "Sometimes contradiction is the clearest way to truth." The contradictory truth at the center of JUST KIDS -- that we need each other in order to create our own selves -- lingers after the last page is turned: Patti's farewell to her "blue star" friend, ashes in the reader's hand.

sexy Christians

Sun, 02 Jan 2011 14:34:03 GMT

1

Dude and I had a quiet New Year's and then he woke me up at 4:30 am to go to the Rose Parade. His environmental organization works with an engineering firm called Parsons, and Parsons had given Dude seats in their box in "media row".

We drove to Pasadena in the early-morning darkness. It was freaking cold. Downtown Pasadena had shut down for the parade, store windows boarded with plywood. People lined the sidewalks, camped overnight with their lawn chairs, blankets and sleeping bags. Some of them had little cooking fires, flames dancing and casting off sparks ("Is that legal?" I asked. I guess so). The line for Starbucks snaked out the door and waaaayy down the sidewalk. Dude and I had no desire to stand in it (it was so cold I didn't want to stop moving).

If we couldn't find coffee closer to our seats, Dude vowed he would hunt it down for me.

Because he is like that.

But once we passed the barricade, where tickets were checked and bags peered into, the only things that people were selling were programs and cheap plastic cushions to sit on. We tracked down one little kiosk underneath the bleachers, but security guards checked our tickets and shook their heads (our seats were in a different section). Oh, cruel denial! Dude scanned the stands, chose a guy who seemed a good, co-operative prospect, and offered him twenty bucks to go buy coffee for us. The guy was friendly and pleasant and came back with a bonus blueberry muffin.

Lives were saved.

The sky grew light and the parade began. Floats dripping with flowers, the pomp and circumstance of marching bands, baton-carrying girls in jumpsuits and leotards that weren't always flattering, horses carrying riders decked out in historical costumes. "They don't show that on TV," someone said, nodding at the people in white uniforms who ran out into the street with brooms and dustpans to clean up between floats. People started cheering every time they collected streamers or whisked away the horseshit. One woman earned such a wave of acclaim after disposing of some particularly impressive horse deposits that she waved to the crowd.

Meanwhile Dude had noticed that the guy sitting below us was the Speaker of the California State Assembly, and struck up a conversation with him.

2

I'm not a sporting person so much. I made the basketball team in high school, but ended up quitting for reasons involving mean girls that I regret to this day. Dude, however, is a huge fan of the Lakers and follows football. He explained to me why I was hearing so many Texan and Wisconsin accents (the teams playing in the Rose Bowl later that day were, as you might or might not already know, or care to know, were the Horned Bullfrogs from Texas Christian University and the Badgers from U of Wisconsin).

The Texan Christians were a formidable presence in the parade. The cheerleaders were sleek and toned and sparkling, in little sequin outfits and cowboy boots. They left electricity in their wake. I was impressed by the definition in their legs. "Those girls are athletes."

"They take cheerleading more seriously in Texas," Dude said.

After the parade, I stomped around to thaw out my frozen feet and Dude and I went to the New Year's brunch at Parsons. A woman from the firm came up to us and handed Dude a thick white envelope. "Here are your tickets to the game," she said. This was news to us. But it turned out Parsons had given us two of their box seats. There were about fifteen people on the waiting list who were extremely interested in whether or not we were going to the game.

We had not planned on it, but who were we to say no?

I had never been to a football game before -- except once in university, which, clearly, failed to make much of an impression on me -- much less a game with this kind of spectacle. Sitting at the front of the box, I looked down into a sea of people in red (for Wisconsin) and in purple (Texas Christian). The opening ceremonies, the formations of cheerleaders and marching band, the parachute jumpers floating down across the stadium streaming flags, the pop-pop-pop of fireworks, the mad cheering as the players took the field. "God," I said to Dude, "no wonder star athletes are known for their huge egos and sense of entitlement. How hard is it to stay grounded and sane when you're celebrated like that?"

I was maybe more interested in the clash of aesthetics at play in the field than the actual game. Wisconsin, in all their red and white, seemed so wholesome. The Texas Christians were in purple and black: sleek, venomous. One squad of cheerleaders wore white ribbons in their hair, but it didn't come off as innocent so much as a play on innocence, a knowing nod to the fantasy. "I want Texas to win," I said to Dude, "because they're sexier."

He thought this was hilarious. He tweeted: She said, "I want Texas to win because they're sexier."

One Wisconsin fan shot back, Then tell her to go live in Texas!

(I don't want to go live in Texas. I do, however, want a pair of those cowboy boots the cheerleaders were wearing.)

The Speaker of the Assembly was also in the box. Dude and I talked to him some more and offered to host a fundraiser for him at my house (good for such things). And so it goes.

Happy 2011, everyone.

It's going to be a good year.

wifework

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 05:26:39 GMT

On the plane I was reading a book called WIFEWORK. The author -- who is twice divorced -- defines "wifework" as the act of taking care of the man's physical, emotional and sexual needs with little to no similar reciprocity. The woman runs the domestic sphere, and the man is expected to show up and offer "help" now and then; the marriage is her responsibility, and he's the volunteer.

(This is not to say that marriage doesn't make unfair or burdensome demands on a man. Of course it does. But that's a whole different blog post.)

The author makes the point that from an evolutionary standpoint, this kind of trade-off once made a lot of sense. The woman was frequently pregnant, or nursing, or carrying around an infant, which reduced her ability to gather food and made her vulnerable to various predators (including other men). So she needed her mate to stick around, protect and provide. It behooved her to be monogamous.

The major benefit of monogamy for the man was that he knew his offspring was truly his, and could help ensure its growth and survival. But that kind of benefit -- ensuring the continuation of your genes -- lacks, shall we say, an immediate punch. The other reason he would trade off sexual variety for monogamy -- or at least pretend to -- had to do with being catered to and taken care of: dinner on the firepit, a clean and wellswept cave, sex on tap, freshly laundered loincloths.

So marriage more or less came into being. Then, a mere generation ago, the Pill entered the scene: a woman could be sexual without enslavement to biology. But marriage still holds and preserves these ancient gender roles. Which is why, the author points out, so many men tend to be happier married, and so many women tend to be happier...wait for it...divorced (despite the drop in lifestyle). (She quotes studies that support this that I won't go into here.)

I would say that now the trade-off involves lifestyle. If the man provides a magnificent lifestyle, the woman is supposed to suppress or deny a lot of her own needs and dreams and ambitions in order to keep both the man and his world (and it's very much his world) running smoothly*. It's often invisible, thankless work, the kind that isn't really noticed...except when it's not done. It's not valued very much, either, since, in the case of a divorce, the woman is so quickly assumed to be a golddigger (worthless and parasitic). Because contribution is measured solely in financial terms. So if she's not making money, then she's not contributing; although more than one husband has pointed out to more than one wife that any money she could earn would make such little dent in household expenses that it makes more sense for her to stay at home. Implication being that if she works, she's selfish.

I'm not saying this is always the case. As always, it depends on the individuals involved. But it seems easy for marriage to remain unchanged amid greatly changing circumstances. Which might be why, ever since the Pill, there's been a climbing divorce rate. Marriage turns into this evolutionary exchange of services, when we expect it to be about intimacy and romance. Both partners get confused and unhappy. Lose-lose.

(I'm not saying this because I'm down on marriage. I'm a romantic. I would like to get married again.)

* women often collude in this, it's not forced on them, it just seems the natural way of things

the muck and the murk

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 02:01:44 GMT

1

I had a great conversation with Jonathan Fields (author of Career Renegade and an excellent blogger besides). We talked about a number of things but I was struck by Jonathan's observations about creativity and uncertainty, which form the core of his current book-in-progress. It made me realize that I've been shying away from the pain of uncertainty that comes along with the creative process: that sense of being lost in the muck and the murk. My own book-in-progress has stalled. It's time to wade into the muck and get it going again.

Your growth as a person and growth as a writer are interlinked. You can't have one without the other. Part of the reason why I'm eager to finally finish THE DECADENTS is to see what kind of writer -- and person -- these past years have made me.

As for the new year. The two themes I want to assign it are change and power.

Change because it's time to change my life. Which has been changing already, but there's a time for reaction and recovery and then a time to create the next act.

Power because I've been thinking, lately, about what it means to be powerful. I gave away a great deal of power at a young age and it's interesting to think about why. Part of learning to claim or reclaim personal power involves learning how to manage -- truly manage -- money, and women in general seem to have an ambivalent relationship with both power and money. We're not exactly sure what a female relationship with power should look or feel like unless mediated through a man. It wasn't so long ago when an independent woman was held up as a freak of nature.

2

Dude and I hit the MOMA in New York and I spent some time wandering through the exhibit of women photographers. It was exhilarating to see my favorites -- Lee Miller, Nan Goldin, Sally Mann -- hanging alongside each other, and an artist by the name of Amanda Ross Ho prominently featured among them. My friend Nina and I once visited Amanda in her studio in downtown Los Angeles, cats watching us from the windowsills. The cats were strays who came and went; Amanda had set up a corner especially for them, with beds and scratching post. "At first it was just the one," she explained, "but then he went away and came back with some friends. Now they all hang out."

(I have an artist character in DECADENTS, and I'm going to steal that bit about the cats.)

life's unanswered questions

Sat, 25 Dec 2010 02:49:43 GMT

While our chicks were away, Dude and I decided it would be too depressing to sit in our empty nests in Los Angeles as the rain came down. And came down. And came down.

(Since it's my ex's turn to get our boys for Christmas this year, I had my "Christmas" with the boys one week early, and so far as I'm concerned the rest is details.)

We went to New York for a few days. Down the hall from our hotel room, some kind of private security was standing guard outside a suite 24/7. We passed the security guards so often en route to the elevators that we practically established relationships with them (two men, one woman, and none of them were going home for Xmas).

And yet we never learned who was inside the suite necessitating this kind of attention.

"We will never ever know," I said darkly to Dude as we left for the airport. "It will be yet another of life's unanswered questions."

I think he might have grunted in response.

the sound of silence

Fri, 17 Dec 2010 22:28:49 GMT

Accidentally ran into the ex at the school yesterday afternoon. To give credit where credit is due, his new wife makes a genuine effort to be civil, and pleasant, and I appreciate that about her. The ex does not do this. He would sometimes not do this when we were married ("What," said a nanny who once witnessed it, "are we in fifth grade?")*.

I actually did have a friend in fifth grade who gave me the silent treatment whenever I displeased her. It was painful, and it generally got her what she wanted, which is of course why she used it at all (and who knows where she learned it). The silent treatment is officially known as withholding and, when regularly used with at least three of these other verbal tactics** -- bullying, defaming, defining, trivializing, harassing, diverting, interrogating, accusing, blaming, blocking, countering, lying, berating, taunting, put downs, abuse disguised as a joke, discounting, threatening, name-calling, yelling and raging -- is a sign that you might be in a psychologically abusive relationship (defined as when one person attempts to dominate and control the other person).

I think about this whenever I see images of Rhianna and am reminded of her situation with Chris Brown. Not every psychologically abusive relationship becomes physically abusive, but all physically abusive relationships begin by being psychologically abusive. Things escalate.

I've been researching this subject for a novel I'm working on, and I was discussing it with my wise and older friend M, a psychologist. She described the verbal tactic defining as someone telling you what your reality is, what you're really thinking and feeling and experiencing, as if they have climbed inside your head and taken control and you're merely a bystander who no longer knows what the hell is going on. Live in this situation long enough, continued M, and you begin to believe that person's version of reality rather than your own, which means you disconnect from that inner voice, that sense of intuition, that is telling you otherwise (and making you think you are crazy). A big part of recovery from a relationship like this is learning to reconnect with your own intuition (which is really a form of nonverbal intelligence).

Which is not to say that your intuition is always right. But intuition tethers you to the reality outside of whatever web of illusions a person might be spinning. So it's wise to pay attention.

* Not that I was always a paragon of maturity myself.

** We all use at least some of these tactics from time to time. Emotional/psychological/verbal abuse is when someone constantly and systematically uses a combination of at least four of them over years. Most if not all of this takes place in private, of course, and by the time the abused partner breaks free -- if she ever does at all -- she (or he) is often so broken-down and angry and fragile that she seems just as crazy as her partner inevitably claims her to be.