Haste makes waste. I’m up to 11,300 words as of today, but there are some structural problems that will have to be addressed in future drafts. I’ve also got two very complicated days ahead of me, with various appointments and obligations. (By the way, I keep forgetting to mention that I’m at Olsson’s tonight, the one in Penn Quarters, helping to promote BAD GIRLS, an anthology of essays. Yes, I’m in there, although it took me a while to find a topic.)
My hunch is that I’ll end up in the 13,000-14,000 range at week’s end, shy of my word goal, but ahead of my chapter goal (which was five, a chapter a day.) In fact, I’ve already exceeding that, with six chapters completed and a seventh started this morning. I might work this weekend, something I try to avoid when possible, and I still have some writing time next week before I head out for Harrogate.
This won’t be the first time I’ve traveled without my laptop. In fact, I did it the last time I went to Harrogate, although I can’t remember why. (The book in progress back then was TO THE POWER OF THREE, and that one gave me fits right up until deadline.)* As I noted on the Powells blog last week, I finished BY A SPIDER’S THREAD in Edinburgh. The proposal for this book (oh, it has a title ANOTHER THING TO FALL) was fine-tuned in a coffee house in St. Simon’s, and WHAT THE DEAD KNOW was worked on in New Mexico, Phoenix, Florida and Wisconsin, while I was touring last summer.
I wanted to go laptop free because mine is relatively heavy; I use the iBook G4 designed for school children. But the bottom line is that I don’t think I’ll have much time to write, anyway, and I think the break will be beneficial, especially for the book. (I’m beyond help.) I’m going to read — I have several galleys, including one by Ray Banks — and think. Revolutionary, I know, but I had an editor back at the Baltimore Sun who maintained that there’s nothing wrong with thinking. Which was, in fact, considered a revolutionary idea in a newsroom. In fact, the request to think, for a moment, before grabbing a pad and running out the door, was wildly suspect. Granted, if something’s burning, you just need to get there. But I was a feature writer and I was often asked to have a “take” on the news.
–What’s up with this Survivor tee-vee show?
–It’s spring. Aren’t people going to nurseries or something?
–Linda Tripp is an ugly bitch. Discuss. (This is, in fact, not that far off from an assignment I was given, one that I found absolutely appalling, because while I thought Tripp had behaved oddly, to say the least, I thought the visceral reaction to her appearance was misogynistic.)
–Are people planning to watch Miami Vice or Dallas tonight? (This is, I think, word-for-word what I was asked to do, in the long-ago ’80s.)
–Hey, what’s in the lost-and-founds at local motels at the end of the summer in Waco? (I actually like doing this story and still remember, TWENTY-FIVE YEARS later, the manager who said cheerfully, “I could dress you from the pantyhose up.”)
Lost to the ages, a written assignment from the Waco Tribune-Herald city editor, who asked me to cover the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new bathrooms in a riverside park, adding helpfully “No big deal.” You know, just in case I came running back in, screaming “Stop the presses! They had bologna sandwiches.” Oh, he also — I could not make this up — asked me to get the full “poop.” For years, I kept it in a frame on my desk, reminding me that things could always be worse.
Which brings us to a memory: nadirs, professional or personal. Got one?
Career Nadir: Being fired by an owner of a newspaper for something somebody else screwed up.
Career peak: Being fired by an owner of a newspaper for something somebody else screwed up.
Reason: I was NOT happy there; it was a job, nothing more. Every time I tried to make it better (the paper) I was shot down. Duh! Maybe dey jest want it for a tax write-off! (Yep, that was it!). Somebody else bought the paper a couple of years ago, and it’s light years better than it used to be, but a LONG way from what it could be. Boca is full of sports, all year long, and they have TWO PAGES set for it in the paper. Sigh…I tried.
Actually, the worst job I ever had, as for as boring quotient, was putting 10 penny size nails in a machine, by hand, that made them into 10 penny screws. NOT kidding! Nearly screwed up my back permanently. Another part of that job included dropping bolts into a metal sheet, that sat up off the table about 3″, so that someone could paint them custom colors for whatever company ordered them. Today those bolts are painted by a machine…thank the LORD!
BUT all this will someday make its way into a story or novel. Everything’s source material, I seem to remember a certain Bmore writer telling me back in 01 in Alexandria, after a hard fought basketball game, in which Steve Hamilton told me I blocked well, and I told HIM, “Block, hell! I couldn’t move out of the way when I saw your 6 foot tall self running at me. Sheer Terror!
Nadir, personal and professional: getting fired from my last permanent job and wondering if I would get kicked out of the country because my visa was expiring imminently.
What a difference a couple of years makes. Knock wood and all that.
Our paper ran a story on a gay-cruising sting at a local rest area. It was a legitimate law-enforcement initiative; apparently the place was so thoroughly cruisy that families with kids didn’t dare use the bathrooms. Over the course of 10 days or so, the sheriff made about 150 arrests, nearly all on misdemeanor charges of public indecency, soliciting, etc.
Our editor decided to print the names of all those arrested. “But we don’t cover misdemeanor arrests as a rule,” some said. “When it’s this many at one time, it’s news,” the editor countered.
Stupid me, I spoke up. The gay community will be outraged, I said. We don’t run the names of students arrested after football-related unrest on campus; why these guys? For my rash remarks, I was saddled with the “reaction” story. The calls to the gay activists were nothing compared to the ones to the arrestees, many of whom didn’t know their names were in the paper until I told them. They ranged from the excruciating to the merely horrible — men crying, men cursing, men screaming “oh my god, I’m going to lose my job!” before hanging up. One man, who practically talked with a lisp, told me at great length about his diabetes-related urinary problems, which required him to stand at the urinal for a long time before he could “start my stream.”
Easily the worst day of my working life. And you can quote me on that.
In the autumn of 1985 I had completed law school and was waiting for my bar exam results. One of my part-time jobs during law school had been working on the events staff at a university in the Baltimore area. By then I was one of the senior staff, and supervised several dozen undergraduates at football games, concerts, and other events.
The stadium at this univesity didn’t have any bathroom facilities. For most events patrons had to walk up a hill to the nearby arena. But for the Homecoming football game that year the university brought in several dozen port-a-potties, and placed them at one end of the stadium near the end zone, in full view of all the fans sitting in the stands. Just before the game started, when the stands were packed with 5,000 fans, a university official ordered me to move several of the port-a-potties. Since we didn’t have a forklift, several of us had to slide the port-a-potties on a hand pallet jack, and drag them past the fans and up a hill to the new location. The entire time I was pulling the port-a-potties up the hill I was thinking how far my undergraduate and law degrees had gotten me – dragging poop from one place to another, in front of an audience.
Happily, a few weeks later I learned I passed the bar exam, and I left the university not long after.
Nadir, professional: Working as a monitor in the college dorm cafeteria. My job was to make sure nobody carried food out. But the “efficiency expert” didn’t like seeing me standing by the exit doing nothing, so he decided that I should also keep the salad bar clean. If I kept the salad bar clean, he claimed people got out with food. If I watched people, he said the salad bar was messy.
I quit.
Thanks Laura. I’ll be sure to read it.
Sarah — as a alien of exceptional ability, I think you’re safe. (She really is. Officially.)
And Sean C. — you should read John Irving’s The Water Method Man, in which is grad school character sells souvenirs at the football games and is humiliated when he’s glimpsed by one of his students. I think you’ve got him beat!
Try selling Krispy Kreme doughnuts at every basketball and football game for nearly a year, trying to raise money for the prom, when some idiot in the class (ahem, me!) ordered 200 dozen too many donuts. Even the fans got tired of them. And my dad had to put 40 dozen in our chest freezer in the storage shed out back of the house. My dog wouldn’t even eat them after a while.
And I LOVE em, when they’re hot and fresh. But after a couple of weeks in a freezer, and back then there was no such thing as a microwave, not too tasty. Finally we used em for skeet shooting on the back 40. Not kidding.
I used to wonder why the birds on that back 40 got so fat, then the light dawned.
Ah, childhood…when bad stuff happens and you bury it deep in your mind, till a picture brings it all back.
Am I the only one who doesn’t know what a nadir is? I could probably look it up, but I like showing off my ignorance every once in a while.
Bryon, nadir is an antonym of zenith.
At the first weekly I worked at, the publisher decided he wanted me to do a story about the swans that had taken up residence around a local pond. He wanted me to write a first person piece about how the swans would react to a person invading their space. I am not kidding. He wanted me to provoke a swan, have it attack me and write about it. After some research, I discovered that a swan can have a wingspan of up to six feet and can do some serious damage to a small woman of 5 foot 4 (I was much thinner then). He didn’t care. He sent me anyway. I hiked around that pond for three days and never saw a swan. He wasn’t happy, but I was.
Journalism — the gift that never stops giving, when it comes to really bad days at the office.
I also remember the time I was working on a story about plastic surgery and one of my interview subjects really, really, really wanted me to feel her surgically enhanced breast to see how natural it was. Oh, and the time I was sent to one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in San Antonio with a sprained ankle, to get “react” from a family whose dead child had, after three days in the sewer system, finally shown up at the city’s treatment facility.
But then there were the good days. One of my all-time favorites: Back when San Antonio was a three-newspaper town (the Light, and the two papers owned by Murdoch, the Express and the News), the three cop reporters worked out of a small office in police headquarters, outfitted with speakers that relayed the various radio calls. My Murdoch colleagues had walkie-talkies and could leave the office, which they did, going to watch one of the Fiesta parades. They reasoned they would be summoned for anything big. A call went out for a “molasses” spill that had closed down part of Interstate 10. I called the fire department and asked if that was code. They said no, an 18-wheeler had lost its entire tank of molasses while trying to get on the highway. It was a good story, and I was the only reporter who had it.