Julie Anne Long

In which Julie has another metaphor attack and natters about inspiration

       Yesterday I sank deliciously into a scene I was writing, came up for air to watch a cartoon and run on my mini trampoline, then migrated back to my computer and mused about what to blog about while I finished up my delicious scene. Thinking about blogging made me think about the sheer proliferation of author blogs, and how this has inevitably led to a sheer proliferation of writing about writing. About plot and arc and dark moments and HEA’s and every little aspect of the process. Which led me to think about my own process, which is seldom a good thing for me, because in so many ways, not thinking about my process is my process. It’s kind of like…it’s kind of like that time in high school when my friend Corinne had a hermit crab for a pet. One day it was just sort of sitting very still in its tank for a long time, all tucked inside its shell, and she began to worry that it might have died, and so she got a little stick and lifted the crab out and began sort of poking at it and—

       Well, suffice it to say, this story doesn’t have a happy ending. If the crab was alive when she began poking at it, it wasn’t when she was done. It was probably just in there minding its own business, just being a crab, when it became a kabob instead. Ahem. Forgive me—perhaps I should have warned you I was going to use a macabre metaphor.  But the motto of this story with regards to my writing process: If you poke at it too much, you could kill it.

       It’s not that I do it mindlessly, mind you. Writing, that is. It’s just that when I write I…am it. The other thing it reminds me of is when I was in a band, of those few final minutes when we’d sit together just before a show began. It was tradition for our singer to throw up from nerves before a show (he claimed John Lennon did, too), and after he got that out of the way, we would all be thrumming with nerves and that peculiar combo of delicious excitement and dread, all of us utterly, almost painfully, focused. I really didn’t want to talk about the show at all.  I was so acutely aware of what was about to happen and my role in it that I was entirely comprised of arrow-sharp anticipation. And of music. Talking about the show before it started seemed redundant and grating. We knew how to play, so we went out and played.

       The funny part is how deeply, passionately I love all things analytical, like databases and spreadsheets and the like. I can get lost in admiration for the processes of other writers, the ones who use flowcharts and colored post-its and index cards. I think my flowcharting, as it were, must happen internally, and I respond to the dynamic needs of the story sort of organically as I go along, the way you know a song needs a bridge when you’re writing it and so you produce it sort of instinctively, or that the soup you’re making needs…oh, perhaps a dash more lime. (Um…lime? you ask incredulously? I made Tom Ka Gai, my favorite Thai soup, from scratch this weekend, and it was so divine my eyes practically rolled back in my head with bliss. There’s lime in it. And coconut milk. You put the lime in the coconut and drink it all up. Hee! Well, there's other stuff in there, too.)

       I’ve also come to realize that I need certain things to prime the inspiration pump. When I'm working on a book, I search restlessly for wonderful, can’t-put-it-down writing in other genres and eras (I almost never read  romance while I’m writing a romance), because it becomes the background music in my head, in a way, as I write. I picked up Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, because I enjoyed White Teeth, but I knew a few pages in it wasn’t what I needed. I put it down again. I’ll come back to it later. And then I discovered Laurie R. King’s books about Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes set just after World War I, which I bought on a whim, and I’m reading them with pure glee. I love them. Intelligent, brisk, unique, wonderfully written. Somehow, they’re precisely what I want to be reading right now. Another discovery that I came late to is…well, the other night I was watching The Ghost Whisperer, which I’m embarrassed to confess I love, and despite the fact that Jennifer Love Hewitt acts primarily with her eyelashes and her breasts and the pathos is built into the premise and not necessarily earned, I fall for it every time. And every woman should have a husband as sweet and bizarrely understanding (and smokin’ hot) as her husband on the show. But this wasn't my revelation. I had just finished watching it when I switched it over to PBS, and caught Prime Suspect. Holy—!! How have I not watched any of these before?? What is the matter with me? It was startlingly brilliant. Helen Mirren blew my mind. The writing, the acting, the characterization, the plotting—masterful.  It was soul nourishment. And though I’m not writing this kind of book, it’s this kind of pure excellence I want to soak up, to have playing as an undertone in my mind when I’m writing, if that makes sense.

       So  hope you guys had a lovely, lovely holiday, and that no paramedics, divorce lawyers or cops were called at any point during the meal. LOL. How about you guys? Let's talk about hermit crabs, the Ghost Whisperer, Prime Suspect, or things that thoroughly inspire you, whether you're a writer or not. LOL. Do you have a guilty Ghost Whisperer-type pleasure? Any recommendations for something thoroughly brilliant that I ought to be watching?

Proof that reading romance makes you nicer

The supermarket I frequent always puts the prettiest, most expensive, most...specific ...magazines next to the checkout counter, which is why I own a slim, glossy tome devoted solely to how to organize your kitchen cupboards (little baskets! cunning little dividers!), and one that confusingly seems to contain primarily recipes for meatballs. (I was seduced by the gleaming coils of pasta on the cover.) The other day, the line was slow (someone ahead of me had grabbed a bag of cat food with no price on it, and a battery of employees had been dispatched to find it while the sheepish shopper waited and held the rest of us up), so I reached for Psychology Today instead, and this is what I learned: a study at the Journal of Research in Personality (talk about a specific Journal! There's a journal for everything! Or one day there will be), frequent readers of narrative fiction (like mysteries and romances) scored higher on tests of empathy and social acumen than readers of expository nonfiction. In short: readers of romances and mysteries are just plain nicer to be around. The reason, apparently, is that stories force us to empathize with characters who are quite different from us, which helps us better understand the many kinds of people we come across in the real world.

I also learned that there's a field called "bibliotherapy," which was founded on the potential of books to help people work through their problems. For instance, a divorce lawyer in North Carolina would recommend Anna Karenina to her clients who couldn't see past their current crises, because it's "a big messy book with a meaningful ending." Psychologist Victor Nell says that a good book "completely envelopes us in a trancelike state" resembling "flow," an immersion so deep and satisfying we don't notice the hours flying by. (This is often what happens to me when I'm writing a book, too.)

So there you have it: books are therapeutic, and they make you nicer. I mean, we already knew that, but it was fun to read about it in Psychology Today, regardless. And the next time you wonder whether you should drop a few dollars on a book, or the next time someone bugs you about burying your nose in one, you can just quote this article. :)

In other news, I saw Borat, and I practically had to tape my ribs afterwards from laughing so hard. It's hysterical and wildly offensive. I was a little worn out by the end, though. And the cover for THE SECRET TO SEDUCTION is up on Amazon, if you'd like to see it. Very pretty!!

Here's hoping you and yours have a wonderful Thanksgiving, kittens (and if you're in Canada, raise a glass to us, eh?), and that it holds none of the drama of Anna Karenina. And if it does, maybe you can use a little bibliotherapy to recover from it. :)

On getting physical

         Some years back, on a whim, I decided to buy a Personal Trainer (well, a few sessions with a Personal trainer) with my tax refund. I wanted a more ingrained exercise habit, and what better way to accomplish this than to hire a preternaturally fit person to stand over me and shame me into doing crunches?  Actually, it turned out to be one of the smartest things I’ve ever done. My trainer taught me how to lift weights without rupturing or dislocating things, and she figured out I was the sort who could be tricked into exercising when it involved things that seem like toys, so she convinced me to buy a mini-trampoline.  Voila! A new, vigorous me resulted in a few months, and vanity and economy (I can’t afford to gain weight, because I can’t afford a whole new wardrobe) along with the whole I-do-feel-better-when-I-exercise thing have helped me keep the habit more or less up even after my trainer and I bid each other adieu.

         But truthfully, though I was a typical bike-riding, tree-climbing little girl, I’ve just never been the athletic sort. I much preferred playing make-believe games at recess than anything involving a ball hurled in my direction. I got away with this all the way through sixth grade… and then came Junior High. Of the many fresh horrors that awaited me in seventh grade, P.E. class was probably the worst. We were issued blue polyester shorts and big blue and white striped (as befitted prisoners) shirts, and after the humiliation of getting undressed in front of other girls, some of whom already had breasts and most of whom reeked of Luv’s Baby Soft, the daily hour of humbling began. I was tall and skinny with posture like a question mark, and I wore thick glasses that bounced down to the tip of my nose when we ran laps around the field—I had to push them back up every few strides.  And OMG, running round and round and round that bloody field was bloody dull. I’d never felt more like Sisyphus in my life. 

         In high school, when we were allowed to choose which P.E. class to take, my friend Cindy and I decided to take “Handball/Weight Training, figuring we’d be the only girls in the class, and what better way to meet boys? The class turned out to be taught by Coach Ingram, who was also the football coach. He was tall and frighteningly muscular and had a glistening bald head the color of gingersnaps and a wandering eye. A literally wandering eye.  He’d be speaking to you, and one of his eyes would sort of drift off in another direction, as if bored with the conversation and searching for something more interesting to look at. (Ironically, his nickname was “Coach I.”)  He was intimidatingly cheerful and eccentric, and I’d once seen him wade into the middle of a big fight between dozens of players during a football game, lift them up one by one by the scruffs of their jerseys, and sort of fling them off to the side, as if clearing the field of detritus. He was grinning. He looked like he was having the time of his life.

         During the weight training portion of our class, Coach I would stroll through the weight room as everyone grunted and strained beneath the weights. “Sweat, my baby dumplings!” He’d roar by way of encouragement. “Sweat, you heifers!” The cutest boy in the school was his assistant, and as Cindy and I were utterly hapless, he was stuck helping us out.  It turned out to be deeply, deeply mortifying to be taught how to do Flies (chest exercises) by the cutest boy in the school, and nearly as mortifying when he had to help me do a pull up, as my legs thrashed and bicycled vainly in space as I struggled to haul my chin up over the bar. If this was a John Hughes movie, the cute boy would have found it charming, and we would have gone to the prom together. Instead, the entire time, he wore a politely blank expression through which suppressed hilarity occasionally peeked. He was a nice boy.

         Anyway, so Handball/Weight training resulted primarily in humiliation and handball-shaped bruises. I switched to swimming the following semester, which was taught by a hearty woman with a, shall we say, practical haircut who was rumored to be shacking up with my Geometry teacher, a tiny, weathered, very patient woman from Texas who rode to school every morning on an enormous Harley.  Oddly, I was better at swimming, but I managed to be stung by a bee on the thumb while I was in the pool. I also had a very stylish bathing suit that involved a drawstring that ran up the front of it and tied around my neck, and one day when I pulled myself up out of the water the suit went rolling down to my waist like Venetian blinds, giving the boy strolling by a great big eyeful of my breasts (I had acquired a pair by this time.)

         Sometimes I think the best thing about graduating from high school was the fact that I would never, ever, ever have to take P.E. again. It took a few years for me to disassociate humiliation with exercise, but I arrived there eventually.

         So how about any of you guys? Did you enjoy your P.E. classes? Were you any good at them? What’s the best/worst P.E. class you ever took? Do you exercise now?

The Dark Side of the Moon

          I moved to my new flat in May of last year, and as I’m sure you’re aware, every time you move to a new place you need to get used to a whole new set of sounds. I had a few “What the f—?!”moments until I figured out that the eerie clinking noise coming from my living room every Wednesday around midnight wasn’t actually in my living room—it was just homeless people picking through the bottles in the recycling bin, which we haul out to the curb on Wednesday night (it’s picked up by the city every Thursday, along with the trash). The clinking sound just carries oddly in the night air. This is a fairly routine San Francisco phenomenon, by the way—the raiding of recycling at night. In fact, in San Francisco, you can pretty much leave anything out on the sidewalk—a sofa, an old broken record player, the shoe you lost the mate to five years ago—and it’ll disappear in no time. It’s a cinch someone will want it. It’s a pretty good system for redistributing goods, the sidewalk system. I actually found one of my end tables on the sidewalk. (I rehabilitated it.)

          But anyway, back to the “What the f—?!” moments: so when I first moved into this flat, I also was unnerved by a sound like something being hurled at the garage door every afternoon, and then I finally figured out it was just the mail being delivered (the mail carrier has to lift these metal flaps on the garage door and thrust the mail in, then he drops the flaps. Hard.) Then there was the sound that used to make me jump out of my skin: the side door to the garage would every now and then slam violently shut—BAM!— all by itself. (Air cross-currents, not a ghost, I finally determined.) The MUNI train goes right by my house, too, and when the train door opens to let out passengers it makes a sort of electronic sound identical—identical—in pitch to my telephone ring, at least from a distance. I was wondering why the phone was ringing every fifteen minutes—I mean, I’m not that popular—and I would nearly break a limb scrambling toward it from wherever I was in the house, only to find it silent. And then I figured it out.

          But my latest flat is a wonderland of quietude compared to some of the places I’ve lived in the city. It’s a wildcard, isn’t it, moving into a new place? You might move into a gorgeous apartment or house, but there’s no way of knowing for absolute certain whether your neighbors own an incessantly barking dog or run a meth lab or, in the case of the cute little studio apartment I once moved into in the fairly yuppie Russian Hill neighborhood of San Francisco, a 24-hour tattoo studio in operation since 1967.

          My first clue that something was amiss in this instance happened about a day after I moved in. I had just come home from work, and I was trotting happily up the three flights of stairs to my apartment when I saw, coming down the stairs toward me, an enormous man wearing leather pants and a leather vest open over what appeared to be a brown sweater, but which on closer inspection proved to be his furry bare stomach (much of which drooped over the top of his pants). His eyes were slits, his arms from wrist to shoulder were green with aging tattoos, and he stared at me exactly as if I was a cream-filled pastry. I noticed he had a hilt of some sort at his belt, and in my experience, hilts typically hold things like knives. He didn’t blink.

        In other words, he wasn’t the usual yuppie one encounters in Russian Hill.

        I greeted him politely, then bounded like a fleeing deer up the stairs past him.

          My second clue that something was a bit off was when I realized that whoever rented the studio below me was playing “Dark Side of the Moon” and "Wish You Were Here" (the Pink Floyd records) over and over and over and over and over all day and all night. Seriously. It was on when I went to bed; it was on when I woke up from fitful, Pink Floyd-themed dreams. I mean, I rather like that record, but honestly, how often can you hear “Wish You Were Here” (fabulous song) before you wish you could shove the record deeply, deeply up the whatsit of whoever is playing it?

          On my third night there, I staggered out of bed and put my ear to the floor and heard a sort of…buzzing sound beneath the Pink Floyd. Like…drills?

          I soon learned from other tenants that my downstairs neighbor lived in a different apartment, but he rented the studio directly below me for his tattooing activities (the large be-vested gentleman I encountered on the stairs was a regular customer). Dark Side of the Moon was his preferred soundtrack, apparently. He’d been doing this since the late 60’s, which I suppose is the beauty (or nightmare) of rent control. Probably long before the neighborhood became “upscale.”

          At 3 a.m. of my fourth night there, I tried knocking politely on the floor, the universal signal for “could you please keep it down?” I was ignored. I then tried pounding on the floor, to no avail. The record played on.

          The story doesn’t end well. The tattoo artist and I finally had an encounter in the hall outside my apartment. He arrived at my door in a huff of righteous indignation—a skinny guy with a wild cloud of hair that started just above his ears (he was bald on top).  He wore granny glasses and a sparkly fuchsia necktie over his t-shirt, and he was seething. “Do you know how hard it is to do a little…a little…mermaid nose”—and here he furiously pantomimed something in the air, I assume the tattooing of a mermaid’s nose—“on a customer, when you’re pounding on the floor?!” I pointed out that many people like to sleep at 3 a.m., because they work in the morning, and that sleeping is hard to do over the sound of Pink Floyd, but this just seemed to puzzle him. The two of us clearly occupied two different universes of logic, and I was the one who eventually moved.

          Oh, I’ve had numerous interesting neighbor situations. For instance, I once lived in the Haight Ashbury with several roommates, because living in the Haight is practically a requirement when you’re in a band (and I was at the time), but in the Haight, I suppose one can hardly be surprised to find one’s self living below a locally famous female Elvis impersonator, or when said impersonator throws a karaoke party during which eighty or so lesbians enthusiastically bellow out Roy Orbison tunes, karaoke-style, until about three in the morning. I had the flu and a fever while I was listening to this take place right over my head, though, so it was even more surreal than you might imagine.
          I have many, many more stories, as I've lived in a number of other places since then, but now I'm listening to the gentle pitter-pat of rain against my office window, and not much else, and I'm rather happy about that. How about you guys? Is it quiet where you live? Do you have any good neighbor or noise stories? What are your daily sounds? :)

  Wish You Were Here  (hee!)

In which I wonder whether it would have been smarter to lie to my masseuse

        I try to get a massage once every few months, because much of my time seems to be spent sitting, typing, or fretting, or some combination thereof, all of which invariably turns various parts of my body into cement. And though over the years I’ve learned to stretch regularly and I’ve turned bath-taking into a religion, sometimes I need a little professional tenderizing to keep all the parts mobile.

       I’m an old hand at getting massages. You take all your clothes off, you wriggle under the towel face down and put your face in the that little cradle hole, and with luck you become nothing but a body for the next hour or so while new age music (usually that ubiquitous Peruvian flute stuff) sighs and tweedles in the background and a helpful stranger (the massage therapist) lotions up and digs into your sore parts. Ideally, for the duration, conversation is limited to a single grunt of approval (me) in response to, “how’s the pressure?” (the masseuse).

       But every now and then I get a chatty masseuse. Why do they want to chat? Because rubbing naked people gets dull? Because they have a captive audience? Because Peruvian music + a naked stranger = the ideal atmosphere in which to exchange confidences? I can only guess at the motivation. I was once massaged by a giddy Irish girl who talked breathlessly, nonstop, about her two boyfriends, Declan and Tom, and how they were both dreamy, and how she was facing a difficult decision. “Oh, Julie, I want to get two notebooks and label one ‘Declan’ and the other ‘Tom’ and write all my thoughts in them because I just don’t know how I’ll choose between them because Declan actually has a job but Tom is sooo handsome and…”   It was a monologue over my bare skin. Ultimately I stopped listening to the words and just enjoyed her accent.

       But I’ve discovered a new danger in conversing with masseuses. This is how it happened:

       For starters, I’m interested in all things holistic, and I’ve become conscious over the years that, for people like massage therapists, our bodies are virtually maps to our general health, even our lives. I’ve had a therapist press the arch of my foot and ask about my digestive problems, and find a sore place on my knee and ask about my lower back (and both were spot on observations at the time). Recently, a masseuse guessed from my rigid right arm and claw of a right hand (OK, I exaggerate a tad, because it’s fun to exaggerate, but still) and my rock hard shoulders (this, sadly, is true) that I must sit at a computer and type and mouse with my right hand all day, and she said so. 

       “What kind of work do you do?” She asked cheerfully.

       Reflexively, I answered, “I’m a writer.” Realizing belatedly that this would undoubtedly invite more questions.

       “Oh? What do you write?”

       "Manifestos," I probably should have replied. Or: “Manuals about car parts.” Unfortunately, even though I’m capable of and thoroughly enjoy spinning wild tales, I find it difficult to full-on lie in the face of a direct question.  Especially when I’m naked.

       “Novels,” I mumbled. I tried to make it sound boring. To discourage further questions. But no one ever thinks the word “novel” is boring.

       “Novels!” She was delighted. “What kind?”

       “Historical romance. Um, you know, I think my right wrist is really stiff, and—”

       “Julie…” she mused. “Julie….Are you…are you Julie Anne Long?? THE RUNAWAY DUKE! Oh my GOD!! I loved it! It’s under my bed!!

       Which was very nice, of course. But this is what I was thinking: “Oh, dear. One of my readers has now seen my butt.”

       She was very sweet, and an avid reader of romances, and she’d seen WAYS TO BE WICKED at our downtown Borders—she even told me exactly where at Borders. And from what I understand, to a massage therapist, a butt is a butt is a butt, and this particular massage therapist will likely buy WAYS TO BE WICKED, bless her heart. But still. It’s a rather disconcerting thought. Perhaps it means I've finally arrived.

       So I hope you all had a happy Halloween. Every year in San Francisco there’s a gigantic street party in the Castro district and thousands of people show up in costume (not me, though—I tend to stay away from throngs). But on the news for the past few days, they kept showing this one clip of our very handsome mayor looking all solemn and forehead-furrowed as he talked about all the new security measures for the party, and how he’s sure everyone will behave "appropriately." This was followed by a snippet of a scene from one of the past year's parties, featuring several grown men wearing beige unitards, antlers and big happy smiles while they frolicked together in a harness. They were reindeer, of course. Ah. "Appropriately,” indeed. For San Francisco, anyway.  I don’t think they (the news) meant it to be funny, but it cracked me up every time.

       So do you guys like to go get massages, or are you too ticklish or bashful? LOL. Have any good massage stories? Did you do anything fun for Halloween?