Happy Blogoversary To Me

Today is the one-year anniversary of this blog! Bust out the champagne!

Oh. It's 6 am. Well. Coffee will do. Slip a little something in it, if you must.

Here’s a Blooming Year One redux.

First post: Popcorn

Blog Inspiration: Late Bloomers

Hero's Challenge, Act I: Consult

Foreshadowing: Free the French Fries

Plot Twist: Plot Twist

Hero's Challenge, Act II: A Bloodcurdling Halloween Horror Story

Audience favorites:

The Lost Weekend

We’re Going to Potty Like It’s 2009

The Farm Share Blues

Torn Between Two Lovers

The Perspective Express

Roots and Flowers

Post That Best Describes My Glamorous Life: Baby You’re a Star

Post I Should Reread When I Get Bat-Shit Crazy: Onward Intrepid Writer

Blog words written: 31, 400

Visitors: 2533

Personal Take-Home: It’s been one heck of a year

Hero's Challenges, Act III: to come

With that, I’m out for ten days. Santa delivered (Santa Brings The Heat)—I board a plane for Hawaii tomorrow.

PS We’re dropping Chester off on the way. I'll take pictures.

PPS It might be time to change my bio blurb to the left. Book burning? What book burning?






Aloha!

WWMD?

Malcolm Gladwell’s article in the May 11 New Yorker is titled “How David Beats Goliath.” The topic is how underdogs win by breaking the rules and supplanting ability with effort.

“We tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is the commodity,” he writes. “It’s the other way around. Effort can trump ability because relentless effort is in fact something rarer than ability.”

This is what one hears at writer’s conferences all of the time. Don’t give up. Keep writing, keep submitting.

A good friend (one with an agent and a book coming out, incidentally) told me the other day that she thinks I got bad advice from my marketing consult (see Book Burning Take 2). If I truly believe in my project, she said, I should keep submitting. She sent out her stories 200 times before she got a book deal.

Actually, her exact words were: “Tell everyone who doesn’t believe in your book to suck it.”

What will happen next? Stay tuned for the next installment of “As the Memoir Turns.”

Unlike Ballet

I have been reading Malcolm Gladwell again: his first book, The Tipping Point. It’s an examination of the factors that kick off epidemics of disease, thought, trend, etc.

I am just not getting into it like I did Blink and Outliers.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the book. The copy is full of great anecdotes and facts. The concepts are well supported. It’s totally interesting and readable. It was a number one national bestseller, for crying out loud. And yet somehow it lacks a certain conversational magic.

It could be that the topic just isn’t as engaging to me. But I think it’s the voice—Gladwell’s less mature voice.

It’s not like he didn’t have bazillions of writing hours and credits under his belt by The Tipping Point—but by Blink and Outliers, Gladwell had bazillions more. His easy, winning voice had grown and solidified (making him his own anecdote for the 10,000 hour rule he describes in Outliers (see my previous post Thanks, Fred)).

Just reminds me that this writing thing is a huge time investment. And makes me think of something a brilliant friend once said: “Luckily writing is something you get better at as you age, unlike ballet.”

Thanks, Fred

The good news: I did not make a total arse of myself during my first-ever surfing lesson.

The bad news: It was nonetheless clear that I will not be mastering that sport in this lifetime.

Aside from forcing my ridiculously nervous self down to Waikiki and forking out $40 to fling myself into the ocean with only a really huge board tied to my ankle to save me, I managed to read the entirety of Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” on vacation. He has many fascinating things to say about success, mostly converging on the themes of luck and hard work.

The good news and the bad news: Luck I can’t do much about. Hard work is entirely up to me.

Gladwell describes the 10,000 hour rule, which declares that mastery of anything can be achieved with the investment of 10,000 hours of good old-fashioned hard work. This implies that, were I to move nearer the ocean and continue to wade into it daily for the next decade or two, I could potentially still become a pretty decent surfer.

However, as I hauled the board up onto the sand three days ago, arms shaking from the effort of one hour’s worth of learning something altogether new, it occurred to me that I am already well on my way to those 10,000 spent writing, and perhaps it is just common sense to apply myself where I have a solid head start.

The very best part? I had expected some local surfer dude as my instructor: young, muscled, long-haired and full of himself. Instead I got Fred: local, all right—as well as scrawny, balding and 68 years old. I LOVED Fred. Fred was patient. Fred called me sweetheart. Fred had me riding waves within 25 minutes.

Fred has been surfing for 60 years. He is the embodiment of the 10,000 hour rule. As a surfer, he is beyond competent, delighted to be out there, and happy to share his knowledge.

My new goal: when I am 68, to be the Fred of writing.

Late Bloomers

Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article titled “Late Bloomers” for the New Yorker last year. It was based on work for his book “Outliers” and compared two kinds of creative genius. There are two styles of going about achieving a work of art, he wrote. In the first, a person sees their project fully formed in their mind and sets forth, often at a young age, to achieve it quickly and entirely. The other is much more experimental and time consuming. We (yes, this one is me) thrash about, putting together one version and then another of whatever it is we mean to create; we fail, we fling the last draft into a tree, we beat ourselves up, we get a new idea, we try again. Every time, we are filled with hope that this time we will get it right. Mostly, we don’t. We despair. But we can’t stop working at it. We keep trying. And eventually some of us do get it absolutely, gorgeously right.

There is no guarantee that I will be one to eventually bloom. There is no guarantee that my book will be published someday, or that I will publish some other book instead. But Gladwell’s article gave me a renewed sense of hope. It was nice, in the first place, to recognize myself in a methodology occasionally witnessed to produce great art. I thought myself simply neurotic, insecure and slightly deranged; well, then, so was Cezanne, and look what he managed to do? But even more helpful was an understanding of the bottom line when it comes to achieving success as a late bloomer—persistence. All of that trying and flailing takes time, and also, it counts as practice. The key is not giving up (also one of messages in Bradbury and his write-three-million-words-and-gain-mastery theory, perhaps). Gladwell’s article was also, of course, the inspiration for this blog.

Deep inside, I believe that my book will be published. It might be in ten or twenty years, but someday, I feel that it will be published. I believe this partly because I can’t stand the thought of it not being published, but also because I know that I am self-abusive enough to carry on long past any reason. Allow me to live long enough; allow me to steal enough hours from my children and husband; allow me to demure from other hobbies I might otherwise take up, like guitar-playing or surfing or scrapbooking (well, probably I’d never take up scrapbooking); and I will produce something worth publishing in a book-like object. Trust me.