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This worked out so well last time, I thought I'd go for it again. Today, it's just about a couple of things that might, by some people, be considered mundane. Boring. Maybe even banal. Like for instance, doing the dishes. But doing the dishes is not on the list. (I don't really mind doing the dishes, though...)


Making Dinner
Making dinner is an awesome treat for me. It's creative, and it's really good meditative time, too. You can't let your mind travel too far or let yourself lose your focus when you are working with a sharp knife. So, it's kind of mental ballet, too! (...but ballet with food!)
We typically get take out several times a week because I work at night most nights, and don't have the time to devote to making meals every night. (Matt cooks dinners too, but I do it a little more often, and I think it is because my take-out tolerance for so-many-nights-in-a-row seems to be lower than his.)
I have been trying to cook meals two nights during the week because I really enjoy cooking, eating food I made, and of course sharing the meals I make! It's really fun times, cooking.
For a long time, I was simply too busy to cook at all (or to do much of anything else, for that matter.) And I really missed it. I now make much more of an effort to make the time to do it (...and to do those other things, too). It's really important to do that kind of stuff - - the everyday stuff that is sometimes considered mundane, but that you really like to do -- and, when you don't have time to do it, you find that you really do miss it.

Adventure-contest Reality TV shows
(Is this one TMI? You can be honest with me.)
I am a total, TOTAL Survivor-head, and have been from Season One. (Passe? P'shaw!!) I have every season available on DVD, and yes, I actually WATCH them (they make for great treadmill viewing). It took the entire first season of the The Amazing Race for it to sink in to the recesses of my brain, but I have been hooked ever since. Fear Factor (RIP)? Check! (Heck, I planned my Monday nights around that gross-out hour!)

Okay, now I know that TV can be somewhat, hmm, how shall I put this... unpopular. Okay, okay! No more nicey-nice -- to some folks, TV is downright depraved! To this I say - you are completely entitled to feel that way. And I totally respect your decision.

Now hand me the remote, and take the phone off the hook. Survivor's on!!

Have you heard of the Versions function in Microsoft Word? If not, you might want to give it a spin. It's a terrific way to keep all your drafts of a story/poem/article/book organized.

Basically, here's how it works:

You open a new document. You write your first draft, saving normally as you go along. When you get to a point (finished first draft or finished first section or whatever) that you want to save as its own version, to have for future reference, you click on File, then Versions, then Save Now. You type in your label for this document, like d1 (that's what I put for draft 1), and any other info you want. 

A first draft of a nonfiction book for the educational market might get this: "d1, mostly just listing of notes with citations."

Then you click OK.

Now, that dialog box closes and you are back in your document. You continue working (right then or the next day or 6 months later if it's a novel draft and you're stuck like me). Once you have your second draft or are to a new enough version that you want to save it, you click File, then Versions, then Save Now.

Then you type in "d2: has all the facts now, but too long. edit then check readability."

Then you click OK.

And so on.

Now, both of these drafts are stored within a single Word document, named whatever you named that document when you Saved it the normal way. You won't see these early drafts unless you click on File, then Versions. That opens up the dialog box that shows you all of your saved versions.

You can open any version at any time and copy from it or do anything else that you want. Each version is available. I find myself occasionally going back to early versions to find information that I cut for space but that I now find I have room for. Or I'll look at an early version of a poem to find the word I liked from that one awful draft that I've lost track of and want to use in a later draft.

I find this invaluable! I no longer have 34 different documents for one manuscript! It makes it much easier to find and cull from earlier drafts, and backing up things is simpler, too. Each version is dated, and they're right there in the order you saved them, so no more trying to remember which version came first.

The only downside to this that I've found in several years of using it is that the document can get very big after awhile. That doesn't usually matter for me. But if my document has images in it (and lots of mine have, lately), the document gets very big and slow to email to editors or critique groups after awhile. So when I'm getting ready to email it somewhere, here's what I do:

I open my document. I Save As and give it a new name. Then, in the newly named document that I want to email, I click on File, then Versions. I delete every old version. This way, I'm left with just my most recent draft and no multiple versions making the file so large it takes an hour to email.

OK, that's all I got. Probably the only tech post/tip you'll get from me, since I'm usually the one asking for tips. I hope you'll try out this feature if you aren't already using it. It's been a great organizer for me.

Um, I guess one other possible problem is that if you accidentally delete this one file, you've lost every possible version of your document. Backup, people, backup! (Here's my lazy way of backing up.)

T. C. Boyle has another of his vintage short stories in a recent New Yorker, entitled "Sin Dolor." It's a story of a young boy who was born with some sort of genetic mutation that causes him to feel no pain. The doctor who examines him for numerous burns and lacerations when he is a child at first suspects child abuse by the parents, though he's at a loss as to why the boy feels no pain. The doctor becomes interested in doing long-term medical observations and since the boy is from a poor family he is able to have the boy spend a great deal of time at his own house, eating, teaching the boy, and generally taking a paternal interest in him. However, after a long period of this, the father appears at the house one day, removes the boy, and leaves the village with him. After a long period the boy and his father return to the village and the doctor comes upon the spectacle of the boy performing on stage, putting red hot blades to his flesh, and piercing his cheeks, while the father is taking up donations. The father has made a sideshow of him to earn money. The doctor manages to speak with him, but the boy is resigned to his fate of earning money to support his family. He dies shortly after.

This is the sort of wrenching story I'd come across in the past from Boyle. Language, style, drama is always superb, but there seems always a hard psychological and visceral toll on me. I remember another of Boyle's stories that stayed with me a long time. A young couple in a new home in southern California, where the high crime rate is of concern, engages a home security firm. They provide the couple with a sign for their lawn warning that intruders will face armed response. This enrages one of the crazies who lives in the area (Boyle has already convincingly portrayed this crazy being interviewed by a woman real estate agent), and he invades the home of the young couple firing a gun and demanding an armed response. He locates the cowering couple and kills them.

I marvel at the power and craft of such writing but I get a sense of hopelessness from the theme and denouement. So, Boyle intrigues me and I couldn't help but go straight to an interview by Diana Bishop with Boyle in my latest Writer's Chronicle. In some selective excerpts, Boyle says he's "fascinated with these other guys to see how they've ruined their lives. Maybe writing about them provides a cautionary tale for me." He says "the theme of man as animal often plays a part" in his stories. "I don't want my readers to do anything. I'm not imposing anything on them. They come to me because they like to communicate…I am simply an artist. I'm disturbed by things, amused by things, love things, am horrified by things. I want to constantly address this mystery of the world and so that's why I'm creating art. If it communicates to people then I'm very gratified." All this fits my take on his stories.

Boyle is currently interested in identity theft—his recent novel, "Talk Talk," takes up this theme. "What is identity, who are you, how do you find out?" I'm not sure I'm ready to tackle a Boyle novel—the short stories affect my mood for long enough periods—but perhaps.

What about his drive, and process? "(F)or me the thrill of producing fiction, of pursuing and discovering something ineffable, is enough…because it's such a rush for me to explore something and see where it will go." As you might also infer from this, Boyle is someone who doesn't write to an outline. Bishop asks, "When you start to write a short story or novel do you know the ending or do you like the exploration?" Boyle says, "I know nothing at all. Nothing. The first line comes and I start…I begin by seeing something and then its translated into a voice talking to me and then I follow it and see where it will go." Bishop asks him how he revises? "Constantly, as I go along." Revisions after the first draft is completed? "It is, with minor exceptions, exactly as it evolved on the keyboard," and apparently doesn't need much more before going to the agent.

I like this one too. Bishop asks, "While you may begin writing short stories or novels with a question, you many not end up with the answer? "No." Also, when Bishop asks can art save the world, so to speak? "Well, the world is unsavable to begin with. Art illuminates you. It makes you feel that somebody else is feeling the same thing that you are so you're not alone. But it doesn't have a political agenda; it can't. Because an agenda destroys the aesthetic impulse of the discovery and the exploration of what you're doing. You're doing it because you have no answer. That's why you do it."

I admire a lot about Boyle.