Rasmenia

“They’re fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don’t listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.” –Lillian Hellman

Know when to tune out, if you listen to too much advice you may wind up making other peoples mistakes.  –Ann Landers

“I always advise people never to give advice.” –P.G. Wodehouse

*

I have a lot of pet peeves. Probably more than a reasonable amount. It’s a rare thing when I can watch TV, leave the house, or hop on the Internet without bitching, mocking, making fun of or simply pointing out something that I find annoying or idiotic. (Unless you’re reading this blog for the very first time, you already know this.)

Often, what I have to do is, I have to stop paying attention to whatever it is that bugs the shit out of me. I must ignore it completely. This isn’t always possible. Try ignoring the human race. It’s tough. Betcha can’t do it for very long. (I’ve tried. People start calling & coming to your house in a panic because they think you’re dead. It’s more irritating than just tolerating them.)

What I have to do then to maintain my serenity levels is, I have to filter out the bullshit to the best of my ability. I’m sure everyone does this to some extent. For me, this is especially true with the Internet because as we all know, the Internet is a never ending flood of bullshit.

However, I’ve been spending more time offline lately. Not having an Internet connection for 6 months sort of weaned me from the world wide teat. I check my mail, I make a few snide comments on Facebook or Twitter, like or retweet some shit, then I go about my day. Every now & then, I’ll get some free time & will spend it surfing around or reading a few articles online. Because I’m connected to several writerly type people & websites, I encounter a shit-ton of writer noise. Some of it is very good, very helpful & very interesting. Some of it is just utter crap.

Especially all of the fucking writing advice.

Advice is helpful. If I do not know how to do a thing, I’ll ask a more experienced person – or someone with a different skill set than I possess – how I should go about doing that thing. I will solicit them for advice. If I want to make my writing better — which I always want to do — I will seek out ways to do this.

So far, the ways I have found to do this are by writing… then writing some more & showing it to the members of my writing workshop. (A writing group works for me. It does not work for everyone. That’s okay.) Then I read books… followed by reading more books, then by writing more stuff.

I will seek out advice in one form or another. When I read a book that just blows the top of my fucking head off with its literary awesomeness, I’ll go out of my way to learn more about the author & their writing process.

I’ll read the occasional book, essay or article on craft. I almost always learn something new by reading these. The only catch is: all of this “advice” should come from a writer who has some serious writing chops. A super word-wrangling champ. If this “advice” is coming from someone other than an author I’ve already read & am familiar with, I want to see the proof in their pudding. Their writing advice essay (or blog post or whatever) should be written well enough to reflect that they know what they’re talking about. I don’t want to read some shit parroting some over-used bits of writer wisdom that we’ve all seen hundreds of times. I want to know what they’ve written. I want to know where their work has been published, whether it’s an essay or short story, or a novel.

Otherwise, I’m outta there. I’ll leave their blog or website, never to return again.

There I go. Down the dark, dusty halls of the Internet.

There is a lot of really bad writing advice out there. There’s a lot of advice that tells you that you can’t. Such as, “you can’t edit as you write”. Bullshit. You can if it works for you. Why not?  Some advice tells you that you must. As in, “you must use an outline”. Please. Good books get written with & without outlines. Stuff your can’ts & musts. These are never good, in any situation. Especially anything that tells you that you can’t. Fuck can’t.

I want more than a blog from someone who just decided to open up a Blogger account & call themselves a writer. I want to see some kind of writer cred. It does not have to be great big massive bestseller writer cred. It can be a wee small mostly unknown indie cred. But for fuck’s sake – it’s gotta be something other than the tired old clichés on writing barfed out on a blog post by an “aspiring writer” who wants to talk about writing more than they want to actually write.

Show, don’t tell. Classic writer’s advice. (How’s that for parroting some shit?) Show me, don’t tell me that you’re a writer. Show me how you’re applying your own advice into your own writing. Advise me by example.

It’s not only the bad, over-used advice from “aspiring writers” with blogs who like to talk about writing & being a writer. Although, yes, I do often find talk about being a writer & “the writer’s life” to just be some boring, romanticized shit.

There is also the fact that one person’s ridiculous & useless piece of writing advice is another person’s magical wand of genius inspiration. It works for one person & for another, it does not & may be scoffed at or made fun of. That’s just the way it is. Not everyone has the same writing philosophy.

What I’ve found is that most writing advice is useless.

What I’ve found is, the more you actually write, the more you can filter the useless dung from the genuine gems of word wizards.

What I’ve found is, it’s better to write than it is to talk about writing & that the teaching should be left to the teachers.

But, you shouldn’t take my word for it. I’m just another writer with a blog… & a lot of pet peeves.

All right, then… it’s been almost 6 months since we moved into this house & lost the luxury of a home Internet connection. Now we finally have it again & I can actually refer to an Internet connection at home as a luxury, rather than a necessity.

Ok… maybe I really don’t believe that. I NEED the Internet. I absolutely need an endless supply of baby animal videos & 10 different columns of nonstop gibberish on Twitter. I require endless stream of commentary on current events to keep me up-to-date & a steady torrent of jingoist YouTube videos on my Facebook news feed to remind me to be patriotic. I MUST have IMDB handy every time I’m watching a movie & can’t remember where I’ve seen that actor’s face before. I fucking NEED Wikipedia to be there every time I have the slightest question about every trivial event or mysterious fruit I happen upon in the produce section.

I can't get on with my life until I've used Wiki to unlock the mysteries of the fingered citron.

These things are IMPORTANT.

Well, until you go for several months without them.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I do have a need for the Internet… I’ve been in France for almost 6 years & while it feels like home, I still have another home on another continent. I miss friends & relatives who I communicate with regularly online. I have to be online to blog, to work with my writing workshop via email & to work with online literary magazines so I can add to my ever-growing pile of rejections.

I do have a legitimate need, but after 6 months of disconnection, I have a better view of how much of the Internet is a fucking waste of time. I can look back at how unhealthy information overload really is. Yeah, the ‘net is a tool, but it’s also a luxury & a bunch of bullshit.

So… what did I do with all of that free time?

Books. I read books. Well, I read books before… but I started knocking down my “to-read” pile a little faster than normal while also re-reading a few non-fiction books just to get my nerd on.

I got a sewing machine. No, I didn’t know how to sew or anything & at first, I realized that I couldn’t YouTube any instructional videos, so I had to employ a primitive method of reading the instruction manual from beginning to end, then just figuring the rest out for myself. Get this: it worked. No, no… seriously. It did. I put things in it, sewed them together & made new things. I shit you not.

The Wire. I finally got around to watching all 5 seasons. To be honest, by the time I finished the first season, the strange twitch I had developed as a result of Internet withdrawal subsided. You know why? Omar Fucking Little, that’s why.

Making better use of your time than just about anything else since 2002.

I worked in the garden. I picked cherries from our cherry tree in the summer & raked up the leaves from underneath it in the fall. I put my cat on her leash & sat in my backyard eating strawberries from our garden while doing nothing except for watching the birds & listening to the wind in the trees. What I’m saying is… I went outside. For no reason other than to be outside.

Ok… so it felt strange, but I did it.

I cleaned the house a lot more than I normally would. I polished all of the brass. I bought some old objects from nearby brocantes (kind of like a flea market) & cleaned them up. I baked bread & a cake… just for the hell of it. (This is relevant because I’m not one for baking. Cooking, yes. Baking, no.)

Even though we only had 6 channels until about a month ago, I decided to give French TV a try since I never really watch it & it’s a good way to hone a second language. While I was pleasantly surprised by the lack of shitty courtroom TV & talk shows, I was disappointed to see how much French daytime TV is really just lame American TV dubbed in French. Trust me, those trite Lifetime movies & TV shows from the 70′s don’t get any better with French dubbing. Then again… they can’t really get worse, either.

Yep. Still corny.

Oh, yeah… & I wrote some stuff. But, something strange happened there. My internal motor that normally produces flash fiction began to sputter & lag. Each time I sat down with pen & paper to write a small piece of flash, I ended up with 5 or 6 pages. Is this what happens to people who live offline all the time? Are their attention spans longer? Are they actually able to focus on a single task for more than 90 seconds ALL THE TIME?

After all of this – & more that I haven’t even bothered to mention – I realized that a part of me sort of liked not having the Internet.

After a few months, I dusted off my unused cell phone & handed it over to my husband, who in return handed me a smartphone. With our phones, we had a minimum… a very slow, very weak 3G connection. Just enough to keep in touch with people online & to occasionally refer to Wikipedia in an effort to win an argument.

Occasionally, I would think to myself, “Damn… this real-life, going outside & spending time more constructively thing is incredible. Who needs the Internet?”

Well… I do, for one. The problem with the Internet, is once you have that much information & convenience at your fingertips, you can’t go back. Not really. If you had bothered to read Flowers for Algernon instead of posting your planking pics on Facebook, you would have already learned this lesson. (Another upside of being offline: I just learned about the planking fad a few days ago.)

But, now… we’re connected. My ass is once again parked in front of my 15″ monitor. I’ve got a high speed connection, several tabs & applications open & a super fast WiFi connection all through the house. Now, we’ll see if my expanded attention span will stick, or if like Charlie in Flowers for Algernon, I regress back to my previous state.

Fuck it. It’s too much to think about. I’m going outside.

We had it all planned out: look at the houses, choose one, buy it, then move into it. Easy enough. Sort of. Olivier & I had both been through the bullshit & hassles of home buying before, though this was the first time we’d be trudging through the muck together.

Finding the house took a couple of months of searching. We got up early every weekend to drive an hour away & wandered through some very cold, damp & creepy houses. Oh… & there was that incident involving my urine. Then, some time during the month of February, we found our house.

So, we started making plans: we’d sign the papers closing the sale of the house on May 27th. We’d move in on May 30th, since there was a family scheduled to move into our apartment on the 31st.

“Damn,” I said. “That’s cutting it awfully close.”

Hell, of course it was too fucking close. You know what they say about how the best laid plans always get shit on.

It was May 25th, just a couple of days before the closing when we found out that our banker had shit the bed – since he didn’t process our paperwork when we sent it to him BACK IN APRIL, money couldn’t be transferred to where it should be in time for the closing. It would have to be postponed. For at least a week.

Dammit.

Ok, so we’d be without a place to live for a week. That sucks, but not as much as trying to figure out what to do with our furniture, dozens of boxes of books & other piles of assorted objects.

Lucky us. We bought our house from a nice guy who rented us the house for a week. As a storage unit. We were able to move our stuff here, but weren’t allowed to live in it yet.

As the movers were dumping boxes & furniture into our house, I walked the cat around on her leash so she could have a nice puke in what would soon be our front yard. I walked her around to the back of the house & right away, I could smell the strawberries in our garden. Cat sniffed around at the enormous rhubarb & the rose bush. “I can’t wait to live here,” I said, pouting at the cat as she lurched & heaved, preparing to spew forth a new wave of barf.

We decided, since the banker would be paying for our lodging, that we’d at least put ourselves in a decent bed & breakfast instead of some dingy hotel. Finding a place that will let you stay for a week with your cat’s decorative & aromatic litter box is no easy task, but we did eventually find a place, just 6 miles from our house.

It wasn’t ideal, but we had our own room, living room, bathroom & even a wi-fi connection. Every morning, we had breakfast in our tiny living room, just outside the door of our bedroom. Not too bad.

Well… except for the two screaming kids, thundering up & down the stairs every 5 or 10 minutes. But, hey… they’re kids. Sure, they were teenagers & probably a bit too old to be bouncing & screaming like monkeys on PCP, but… they were kids. I guess they really weren’t as annoying as the owners wanting to get into the bathroom while we’re taking a shit or a shower because their washer & dryer is in the guest bathroom… or just walking right in while I’m picking a winner at the bathroom mirror to ask, “Um… so, when are you leaving?”

It was a nice enough place, but not the most relaxing bed & breakfast experience we’ve had.

Luckily, during the week we spent there not relaxing, the banker’s blunder had been taken care of & the closing could go on as planned. It went off without a hitch & we were even provided with some comedy at the notarial office when the guy looked over our papers, saw my occupation & asked, “You’re a writer? You write what? What? What have you written? Oh. Okay.”

I think he asked me this about 6 or 7 times during the 20 minutes we were there.

After stopping by a bar to have a drink with the seller of our new house, we bought a couple of pizzas from some surly dude in a pizza truck & went home. To our new house. With no water.

Uh-oh. The water was supposed to be on. Now that we had a home with TWO bathrooms, Olivier & I were looking forward to our first simultaneous poo in the new digs. The poo party only had to wait for one day because a very tiny & adorable old man from the water company came out the next morning.

Now we only had to wait a few more days for the phone. Two guys from the phone company came out later in the week, ran around our property, in & out of our tool shed, up & down the driveway & even in a goddam tree several times before telling me, “c’est pas possible aujourd’hui… la cable est kaput… on dois revenir plus tard.”

Translation: your phone line is fucked.

We made another appointment with France Telecom to replace our cable. They didn’t show. When they called Olivier to tell him they were having “car trouble,” it just got worse.

“I took the morning off work to be here,” Olivier told the guy on the phone. “Can’t you send someone else?”

“No. Not possible.”

“Well, tell me when you think you can get here. I’ll wait.”

“I don’t know. Call France Telecom. They’ll give you an appointment.”

So, we called France Telecom to make an appointment. They said they would call within 24 hours. Some consider 24 hours to be equal to ONE day. At France Telecom, it’s about 3 days.

We listened to the voice mail. “We were calling to reschedule your appointment since you weren’t at home the last time we sent someone out there.”

Um… what?

Ok… just to be clear, we are getting the stellar customer service from: FRANCE TELECOM.

So, in the meantime, we’ve been making trips to McDonald’s, where I sift through my rejections from editors among the shrill sounds of screeching toddlers & their nagging parents while the scent of greasy death wafts around my nostrils.

Or, on really special days like today, Olivier leaves his cell phone at home so that I can hook it up to his annoying laptop (ugh… PCs) to obtain a painfully slow, but adequate mobile Internet connection. (If you’re wondering why this post has no photos, there’s your answer.)

We still have no idea when we’ll have a normal Internet & phone connection again, but there are no screaming children or screaming anythings around here. No obnoxious neighbors knocking on my door to ask me about trivial shit, or hammering on the wall & using power tools during my writing time. It’s peaceful.

All of the strawberries have been eaten, but we’ve got 2 enormous cherry trees in the front yard & every few days, we collect a colossal bowl full of cherries, which means that every few days, we eat another colossal bowl full, so we’ve had plenty of opportunities for those simultaneous poos that we love so much.