Category Archives: readin' and writin'

Read These New Blogs Now

Posted by plumpdumpling on February 11, 2010 – 2:35 pm
Filed under readin' and writin'
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I know this sounds cheesy, but aside from actually needing to write in order to keep all of my feelings from bursting out of me at inopportune times, I like the community that a blog creates. I like having a few people who I can rely on to find something to say about everything I post and who can rely on me to do the same. (i.e. Tracey and Bachelor Girl)

A lot of blogs that I like end up failing, and I think it’s because they never develop a community of people who make them feel as if it’s important that they keep writing. (Not that I think I’m curing cancer here.) Mostly it’s because they never make an effort to reach out to other bloggers, maybe because most writers are insecure yet narcissistic.

What I’m leading up to is that there are a few blogs that I recently started reading and that I’d really, really love you to read, too. Because I like nothing more than to see your comments on other blogs and to publicly mock you for them.

• Feast on Scraps, Tracey’s idea/inspiration blog that’s loosely related to our forays into scrapbooking but is mostly just pretty stuff she likes

• Good Hair, Kim Luck, Kim’s blog about how Jesus has given her great hair but absolutely nothing else good in life

• Sandy Olive, Sandy’s blog about . . . you know, stuff . . . and I’m not even sure why it’s good, but it is, and it’s often very heartfelt

Feel free to comment with any blogs you think are worthwhile, too.

All of the Memory Cards in the World Wouldn’t Be Enough to Hold All the Unnecessary Quotation Marks in New York City

Posted by plumpdumpling on October 27, 2008 – 4:40 pm
Filed under bigtime celebrity, readin' and writin', why i'm better than everyone else
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Hey, look! Some of my amazing photography prowess is currently being displayed on the front page of The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks!

Dr. Boyfriend and I were walking down Broadway on a hunt for rainbow-flavored shaved ice one weekend afternoon this summer when we spotted a store window full of the chintziest figurines imaginable. I thought the sign was pretty lame, actually, but I really wanted to give fame to the Last Supper sculpture below it:

Sadly, blog owner Bethany evidently didn’t think Jesus made the grade and just posted the sign itself.

I’m a Nationally-Recognized, For-Real Writer (Sorta)

Posted by plumpdumpling on August 7, 2008 – 1:32 pm
Filed under bigtime celebrity, narcissism, readin' and writin', why i'm better than everyone else
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Clearly I don’t brag about myself enough here, because I never told you that I totally won an extremely important and incredibly lucrative writing contest earlier this year. The contest was sponsored by the Gotham Writers’ Workshop here in NYC, and the idea of it was to submit a memoir made up of only six words.

Their example was a famous one by Hemingway that says,

“For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

Ohhhhhhh, it tugs on your heartstrings, doesn’t it? My boyfriend Kamran’s friend Mike told us about the contest and offered up,

“I should have asked her age,”

to which Kamran replied,

“And then I got crabs again,”

and while I thought those were both brilliant, I went a much more serious route and submitted,

“I’ll never know mom’s meatloaf recipe.”

I didn’t actually expect to be chosen, of course, because I thought it was only meaningful to me. This is sort of embarrassing, but I’d been having a deep hankerin’ for meatloaf around that time, and my mom’s was so much better than any I’ve had since, and I’d kill to make it just like she did. But of course she’s been dead eight years now, and of course I can’t remember exactly what she put in it, and of course my dad isn’t any help in the matter. And thinking about the empty hole in my stomach where that meatloaf should be made me think about all the empty holes in me that parts of her should be filling, and so I entered the contest.

Weeks later, I received an e-mail from the Writers’ Workshop that said,

Here’s a writing contest update from the co-editors of the New York Times bestseller Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure.


———————————–
Dear Gotham Writers,

Thank you so much for taking the time to enter our Six-Word Memoir Writing Contest. You guys crafted some amazing submissions, and choosing a winner was extremely tough (when we compiled Not Quite What I Was Planning, a least we got to choose 832!)

But, this time around, the winner is….

I’ll never know mom’s meatloaf recipe.
by Kathleen Ett of Brooklyn, NY

———————————–

The “but, this time around” dashed my hopes, but then I realized that this was a mass e-mail and that the but was intended for everyone BUT me! So evidently the judges got the implicit meaning, even if the explicit words themselves were sorta lame.

And my prize? Well, absolutely nothing. But it looks like I’ll be published in the sequel to the original six-word memoir book, and that’s pret-ty rad. Plus, my name is all up in lights on the results page at the Gotham website. Neat, huh?

The interesting thing is that this was the same week I found out I was going to be in an issue of Time Out New York (and more on that here, for posterity) and that I’d gotten a part in an upcoming Meryl Streep/Amy Adams film. I guess good things really do come in threes.

Book Slut

Posted by plumpdumpling on June 24, 2008 – 10:19 am
Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, fun times on the subway, readin' and writin'
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I feel like a different and better person when I have reading material in public, especially hardcover books. Back when I worked for Barnes & Noble and had all the hardcovers I could ever need and want at my disposal, I ripped through everything the day it was released, wanting to look all-knowing in front of customers. “Oh, the new Junot Diaz? I mean, it’s interesting, but I don’t get the hype,” I’d say as I led them instead to the Miranda July collection of short stories. “No, no, don’t get that Augusten Burroughs,” I’d command, adding, “You really need to read Running with Scissorsfirst if you want to enjoy Dry, and you can skip Sellovision altogether.” Once I quit there, though, I realized that I couldn’t afford to buy the hardcovers I was used to getting for free, and I’m not the kind of girl to own paperbacks.

I’ve been making due with library books for months now, but it’s not the same. I know that people see the little Dewey Decimal number on the spine and think less of me; the New York Public Library, after all, is only for doctoral candidate research and minorities who want to look at porn but can’t afford to have the Internet in their own homes (unlike the Columbus Metropolitan Library, where I used to work in Ohio, which provides what its users want and not what looks most pretentious on paper and is a beacon for the community, so ha). So thank god for my extremely generous co-worker Adam, who without any urging on my part, purchased the new David Sedaris book, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, for me out of the goodness of his heart a couple of weeks ago.

Now when I’m on the train, I feel people looking at me differently. Not only are they thinking, Look at that girl with her expensive hardcover,” they’re also thinking, Oh, David Sedaris has a new book? My, aren’t I behind the times. The only problem is that I find myself reading this book sooooo slowly, just to make it last longer. I read the same paragraphs over and over to really suck all the worth out of them and take every chance to close the book after only reading a page or two. My subway stop is five stations away, so I’d better just, uh, put this back in my bag and, uh, concentrate on where I’m going, I’ll tell myself.

I’ve been wondering what I’ll do when the pages inevitably run out. Sure, I can reread it a couple of times without anyone noticing, but then what? Submit to paperbacks just to be able to hide them inside the Sedaris? Take to stealing dust jackets of even newer, more expensive books to slap on $5.98 copies of leftover bargain bin chick lit? Actually reading my copy of the 688-page I Am Charlotte Simmons like Adam’s been pushing me to just because I know it’ll take me two years to finish it?

LIFE IS NOT WORTH LIVING IF I CAN’T HOLD A BOOK FACE-OUT AGAINST MY CHEST FAUX-ABSENTMINDEDLY AND ALLOW PEOPLE TO ADMIRE ME.