My grandmother is a haunted house. When she moves, she creaks like a stair. When she talks, her hands open wide like windows, letting in the lavender night. Shadows fall upon her arches and skylights.
Ghosts cloud her eyes and tremble her fingers. They turn the milk. They pinch her handbag and her teacup. In [...]
Archive for October, 2011
story: my grandmother is a haunted house
Monday, October 31st, 2011story: the hidden mother
Monday, October 31st, 2011When my mother goes to work on Saturday mornings, I open all the drawers in her nightstand. I crawl on my belly under her bed, and stand on a chair to pull down boxes from the top of her wardrobe. Inside the boxes are letters and tickets and pictures that I have seen a hundred [...]
love medicine
Monday, October 31st, 2011I am lurgified. My head feels like it has been stuffed with bees. In case you are not sure, this is a bad thing. Please feel sorry for me.
Anyway. On with the blogathon.
Recently I read Love Medicine, by Louise Erdrich. It is beautifully written. Her characters are so vividly realised that you can [...]
uninspired
Sunday, October 30th, 2011I suspect I might be succumbing to the lurgy that has been going around here for the past two weeks. I’ve done my best to avoid it but a lot of sick people have been breathing near me recently, coughing without putting their hands over their mouths, sneezing and not immediately rubbing everything down with [...]
the truth about cats and dogs
Sunday, October 30th, 2011Blogging is a steep learning curve. Now I know never to slight cats in public again. They have their defenders. More surprisingly (to me), they have actual haters. I felt a bit embarrassed that people assumed I was a cat hater, when all I’d said was that cats are evil. Which is hardly contentious at [...]
writing is rewriting
Wednesday, October 26th, 2011So I plucked up courage and read the first draft. It was everything I expected it to be: sloppy, solipsistic, boring. But after reading it, I wrote a list of everything I liked about it, and there were FIVE WHOLE THINGS! So much of the story became clearer to me as I read, particularly towards [...]
the fear
Sunday, October 23rd, 2011I’ve got the fear.
It’s half-term next week, and it’s about two months since I finished the first draft of my novel. A good time to start editing and revising. That was the plan, anyway.
So this morning I printed out a paper copy, with the intention of reading it through once and taking it [...]
everyone: shut up
Wednesday, October 19th, 2011On the bus this morning, I sat next to a woman who was reading one of those women’s magazines that say things like ‘HAVE SEX!!!!!!’ in giant orange letters across the front cover, alongside a picture of a minor celebrity wearing an outfit made of dishcloths.
She (the woman on the bus, not the dishcloth [...]
