Happy New Year -- and more Woe Is Me Juggling and Complaining

Years ago, in a very fem-friendly high school English class, I read (and then re-read on my own about a zillion times) Charlotte Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper." From what I remember -- and I remember it pretty clearly, I think -- it's a story about a woman who has been sent to bed for your garden variety turn of the century (1892) female hysteria. She sits up in her room, completely divorced from the goings on of her own life, denied all entertainment / distraction, including even a pen and paper, and becomes obsessed with the patterns she sees in the yellow wallpaper on her walls, because what else is there? Eventually she sees people in the patterns, and as she grows quietly more and more and more insane, she believes she is one of them and climbs on in.

That story is the scariest story I have ever read -- and in context, I probably read this around the same time as Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," and I still vote "The Yellow Wallpaper" a million times scarier -- basically because I relate to it so strongly. I mean, she wasn't even allowed a pen and paper ... I, too, would go incredibly and irredeemably nuts.

Here's how I know:

I take one week off writing-writing -- the real writing, the work -- and I become a total bitch. Even if it was my choice to stop writing -- even if I decided to pack, or clean, or be Volunteer of the Year at my kids' school.

I take two weeks off writing-writing -- and I descend into a self-worth-questioning morass of chocolate-consuming, late-night weepies.

I take three weeks off ... the shit hits the fan. That's basically where I am now. Consider this:

6 weeks ago I finished the first draft of the screenplay for / with Mr. Lovely and Hilarious. I also started packing up the house for our move into the Dream House.

A week later, I started the second draft. And I ramped up the packing. Mr. Lovely and Hilarious and I started sending pages back and forth, which was a pretty decent system, until The Move began to consume me ... at which point my writing slowed, his sped up, and he decided he might as well write Draft 2 "on his lonely," as we say around here.

That sounded good at the time. I had to pack. I had to move. I had to incubate twin boys and care for toddler girls and hold it together somehow. And I had a lot of apartmenttherapy.com to catch up on.

But here's the rub:

We moved into the Dream House three weeks ago -- and I promptly went on bedrest. It's hard to really complain about bedrest when you have a nanny and husband who works at home and can basically sit on your ass and make them do all the diaper changing and grocery shopping and errand running and meal providing while you, well, sit on your ass.

HOWEVER -- sitting on your ass in the middle of your household is no way to get any writing-writing done, especially when your actual active PROJECT is being done by Mr. Lovely and Hilarious and you're just waiting around on it (not that I could concentrate on it if the situation were reversed, I mean, I'm sitting here in the middle of my loud friggin' household where there is no way I could get anything done ... especially as I stew over the fact that no one is doing anything the way I would do it myself if I weren't on fucking bedrest, but that's a subject for another day). Regardless ... I am not writing-writing. And I am going a little insane.

I was doing okay, really I was, until my husband walked in last night and said he'd finished unpacking his office. That was sort of the last straw. See, the whole point of the Dream House, for me, was a pantry, a laundry room, a guest room, and my own "DO NOT DISTURB" office space. I have spent the last six years thinking about that office space. I have designed every spare inch of my smaller-than-9x9 refuge -- I have done drawing after drawing of the furniture plans, I have gone over and over the cabinetry, I have surfed the internet for file cabinets for hours at a time, I have sat on dozens of sofas smaller than 51 inches long. But my office remains a mess of boxes because I am on fucking bedrest. My files are not in those file cabinets, because I have to depend on the kindness and priorities of other people to take my file cabinets to the body shop to be painted before I can file my papers. I still don't have a desk. I still don't have the couch. I still don't have my fucking OFFICE.

This is a dumb thing to complain about, it really is. I mean, even if I had my office, I couldn't hang out in it, I'm on bedrest, cooking the twins, and that is literally the most important thing I need to be doing right now. But the problem with bedrest is that I am never alone. It doesn't matter if the door is closed, people are in and out all day. My kids are the loudest tiny people on earth, apparently, and my husband likes to sing to himself. All. Day. Long. And make calls on speaker. Which apparently he believes doesn't work unless you are SHOUTING into the phone. And I am stuck here, in the middle of it, with nowhere to be alone.

Which is not, it turns out, really just a "Yellow Wallpaper" problem. I mean, I have TV, I have internet, I have the Huffington Post and the pre-eclampsia boards, where I am killing ridiculous amounts of time. And I have the constant, whether-I-want-it-or-not, human-interaction.

And THAT'S the problem -- I'm really climbing the walls because I have a "Room of One's Own" problem. I am never alone. Pre-Dream House, I had no private space either, but I could escape a few hours a day and go write in a coffee shop. And that was fine. But that's all gone now, and I am losing it.

I am fairly certain that the number one reason I am a writer is that I am, by temperament, someone who craves being alone. I don't get lonely when I spend a few hours writing-writing -- I get jazzed. I get re-charged. I don't feel cut off from other people, I feel more connected to them, when I spend a few hours alone. I like to eat alone. I love to go to movies alone. I just like to be alone.

And I am getting desperate. I literally broke down CRYING when my husband walked in here a minute ago to ask me what I want for lunch. I almost killed the nanny for coming in to get the laundry this morning. If I don't get some space soon, I don't know what I'm gonna do.

Which is fucking hilarious, considering as of a few weeks from now I am going to have FOUR KIDS. FOUR KIDS. Which makes it incredibly unlikely I will ever be alone again.

Not until they're all in school, at least -- which, and yes, I've done the math, is the fall of 2013.

Here's hoping I get my office unpacked before then.

Another Vote For Throwing Money at the Problem

I spend a lot of time thinking about gender issues in terms of marriage, about how I spend a lot of time doing dishes and laundry and paperwork and Husband mostly gardens, is in charge of buying and maintaining our cars, and feeds the cats. Note that what I do is a daily thing and what he does is less so, since he tends to walk out the door to work in too much of a rush to remember the cats, and I end up feeding them anyway.

Since he goes out to work, and I “work at home,” I also end up with most of the dog care. The “work at home” thing also means Husband figures I can be home for Fed Ex guys, or to make important faxes for him, or to get him the phone number for some person or another that he’s forgotten at home. None of this stuff is good for getting my work done so much as it is incredibly helpful for accomplishing his.

This was a struggle all summer, as he settled back into full-time, off-home-site work and I returned home from my rented office space. At first, I was thrilled to be home, because of the incredible savings on my office space rentals, but also because I could get chores done in the middle of the day, rather than waiting until I was so exhausted after dinner that things got lost in the mix.

Then he started calling. And calling. And calling. It’s nice that he likes to check in, and in fact I adore hearing his voice pretty much WHENEVER. But I like it less when I’m working, which tends to be in the mornings, before life is too distracting, and I like it LOTS less when the calls start, “Are you home?”

So I’ll be honest here: for a couple of weeks I just straight-out lied. My cell would ring, he’d ask, “Are you home,” and I’d say, from the comfort of my chair at our kitchen table, “No.”

That worked for awhile. But I was also battling the creep of personal affairs onto the territory of professional ambitions. Our life this summer has catapulted us into the realm of True Adulthood in a number of ways, and Adulthood requires a hell of lot of a person to do at home. It can take up every minute of the day, really.

The only thing to do when that happens is to get the hell out of the home, as quickly as possible.

This is not new information—I periodically realize I need to work out of our home. That’s why I rented office space. But I had just given up my office space, and it was hard to justify the thought of renting space when I had a perfectly quiet office space at home, thanks to Husband working elsewhere. Also, there was the question of the puppy. Can’t really leave the puppy home all day alone. She doesn’t like it, and she expresses her displeasure by ripping things up in a puppy-like way.

So, two problems: puppy needs exercise / baby-sitting, and I need a place to work that isn’t home. Solution: throw money at the problem.

On the puppy-front, we bought a monthly membership for daily doggie daycare, at a savings of $25 compared to what we used to spend for 3 days / week.

Even better, on the writing-front, there’s a fabulous wonderful café near daycare with ample outlets AND wi-fi and a space so large there is never any pressure to get up for the lunch time rush. Instead of spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars each month for my crack den office, I now spend about $3 in the morning for a latter, and $10 more at lunch on a sandwich – at a savings of about $400 / month compared to what used to be rent.

And I write like the wind. I’m now within 2.5 chapters of completing the first draft of this novel. Yippee! Go me!

Another triumph for spending a little money when you need to free up a bunch of time.

A House of My Own

I’ve been meaning to post an ode to my office for months now. I’ve wanted to share the sense of purpose I felt each day, driving to work in my own private space. I wanted to talk about the joy of having all of my books and papers and files around me, arranged exactly as I wanted them, never touched or moved by anybody else. Nobody bothered me because I didn’t have a landline, and I didn’t send or receive mail. At my office, I could be totally the WRITER ME, independent of anything else. Plus I was two blocks from Starbucks. It couldn’t get any better than that.

Then something unexpected happened: Husband took a full-time job at an office out by the airport, and I surprised myself by deciding almost immediately to give up my lease and move my working life back home.

I first bought this house because it was small and bright and tucked high enough into the hills it seemed appropriately cloistered for a writer’s purposes. The views of Hollywoodland and Griffith Park were hypnotic and inspiring. I thought I’d get a lot done here, and I did—this was where I finally finished the MFA thesis I’d been working on for four years.

Then Husband moved in, and like me, he was a work-at-home type. The problem was the work he did. He’s in advertising, which means he has to deal with clients—dealing with clients means a lot of time on the ringing AND speaker-enabled phone. Being in advertising takes a special sort of person, a person who works and speaks in ADD-style bursts appropriate to short, grabby headlines and tiny chunks of punchy, easily-digested text. Which means Husband takes a lot of breaks throughout his workday, checks out a lot of streaming, audio-heavy content on the internet, sings to the cats, watches a hell of a lot of CNN.

I tried not to let his style bother me, but the fact was I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t get still enough to hear myself, and there was never any forgetting he was there. And the more present he seemed, the more difficult it was me to consider myself independent of him. When Husband is there, I am very much a wife. So I fell into wifely stuff—cooking, cleaning, organizing our lives.

I realized pretty quickly I need space where I was independent of him in order to write.

He wouldn’t rent space, so I did. I found a tiny little room near my gym. That was pretty much all that was good about it. It had a vent in the ceiling through which I could smell everybody’s lunch, and the guy upstairs was a sound engineer for the moves, who listened to every bit of music with the volume up high. Plus I shared the suite with two other people, one of whom insisted on constantly visiting with me, another who brought in people to help her handle big projects, groups of design students who laughed and smoked all day just down the hall.

I was almost relieved when I lost my lease. My new place was bigger, brighter, more private. It also cost twice as much, but I loved it enough to get there everyday and I really focused. I wrote several stories, two essays, two-hundred-plus pages of a new novel, and launched my editing business in a year.

But it wasn’t all perfect. First of all, I didn’t like paying the rent, which seemed incredibly inflated for a tiny space in an illegally subdivided house on a crappy street. I didn’t like that walking from my car to the door to my office required crossing a lawn covered in dog-shit and bordered with wildly overgrown aloes that obscured the perimeter path. I shared a bathroom with another apartment, and the doors locked from the outside. Plus the walls were paper-thin. First there was the single mom who left her kid with the grandmother for several weeks—all three generations were loud and mad. Then there was the woman with the vocal cat. Finally, recently, a girl’s moved in whose got a very very energetic boyfriend. They go at it top volume at least three mornings a week.

None of this was enough to make me want to give up my office. Despite the drawbacks, it was still, first and foremost and most importantly, MY SPACE. But then, last weekend, while trying to navigate the filthy lawn in a pair of Italian heels, I fell into one of the aloes and cut open my forehead.

When the landscaping attacks you, you stop thinking of anywhere as YOUR PLACE.

So I’m coming home again. Sure, I have worries about becoming distracted by the stuff of my day-to-day, and I’m not thrilled at being here for the UPS guy, or dealing with the ringing phone (which rings a lot, I’ve discovered—mostly telemarketers, especially a firm called SD&A which calls at least three times a day). But I’m also excited about coming back to a space where I have snacks in the cupboard, and my very own bath. And since Husband is away all day, the WHOLE HOUSE, at least from nine-to-five, is a room of my own.

On Rooms of Our Own (Again, Forever, Always)

We're about to start a major renovation at home, which has me thinking a lot about how/what I want my workspace there to be. I've already told our architectects it has to be quiet and somehow "separate" from the house, so people have to think twice about bothering me, but also so I catch myself as I'm getting up from the chair to go do dishes and make myself sit back down. I worry lots about going home to work again -- having office space a fifteen-minutes drive from home has been a blessing upon blessings, really. But we're not building more rooms so that I can keep throwing rent money at the dog-collar wearing kid I'm renting from here, so that being said, I think I ought to forward this essay to our architects as a sort of guide to how a writing space ought to be.

From Under the Pile of Boxes

For a tiny, 50 sq ft kind of space, I seem to have collected a shitload of stuff. Packing up to get all moved in to new space many miles from here ... goal is to be settled in by weekend and ready to be raring in new office by Monday.

Meanwhile, I have been coffee-shop writing the last 10 days or so, and it's been alright ... got some of the Mr. Orman story done, and am well into the travel essay I've been kicking around since July.

First Month of 2005 Progress Report Check-in:

FINISH DRAFT OF 2N CHAPTER: Incomplete but in progress.
FINISH DRAFT OF SHORT STORY: Incomplete but in progress.
4 HOURS DAILY OFFICE TIME: Transmuted into "500 words daily" -- that said, mission accomplished!

Ok, so I didn't get all I wanted done done. HOWEVER, I did write 500 words each and every weekday plus 3 Saturdays, so I am patting myself on the back and letting this month be a wash. There is something to be said for being midway through chapter, story, and essay: to wit, it's a hell of a lot better than NOT.

Goals for February:

SET UP NEW OFFICE -- complete with plants and candles
FINISH DRAFT OF 2N CHAPTER -- and get into NEXT CHAPTER
FINISH DRAFT OF SHORT STORY
FINISH DRAFT OF TRAVEL ESSAY
WORKSHOP TRAVEL ESSAY

With that, I return to the packing up.

Feng Shui Foolish

Got to the office good and early today but still managed to kill nearly 90 minutes surfing the internet. Distraction inspired by an article in the Times today about a woman who Feng Shui-ed the apartment she shares with her husband. I'm not a feng-shui-er (in a supreme case of funny, I recently de-cluttered a feng-shui set I'd been given years ago). HOWEVER, I am about to have to move offices, and it occured to me that in setting up whatever new space I end up with, I might as well try a little feng-shui-ing, because seriously, every little bit helps, and it's not like it can really hurt.

Plus I live in LA and every once in awhile you have to give in to your flakier instincts. For instance, I periodically give in to yoga for a couple of weeks at a time before dropping it again.

Anyway, I ended up feng-shui surfing for a ridiculous amount of time today before finally throwing money at the problem and buying two feng shui books.

Despite my new-found fear that my blue desk may be "drowning" creativity--is that why I write from my red easy chair? And should my red chair actually be yellow? Where do you buy a less-precious water fountain?--I still managed 515 words on 2N.

And while I'm talking new office decoration, I think I deserve a better desk chair. I keep saying I'll cash in for a real chair when my novel's done, but I think that might be slightly bass-ackwards. As long as I have to sit in the fucking thing every day, shouldn't I enjoy sitting in it? Wouldn't I be more productive without the leg cramps and back ache?

And DWR sells the one I want in a lovely lime green. If I put a lime green chair with a blue desk, does that cancel out the "drowning" aspect of the desk, considering that green-blue colors are good for artists?

On the Loss of A Room Of My Own

Thursday, I was informed I am losing the lease on my very inexpensive, very convenient-to-the-gym office space. (Come to think of it, that's probably why my work has slowed to a halt.)

Unmoored is not even remotely the right word to use here. How is it I finally get my bearings again just in time to be EVICTED?

Aargh. Need new office space ASAP. How annoying. I'd start looking this week, but wrinkle in this plan is the slight chance Husband may win exciting new job in NYC and we may be moving camp. Double argh. So I can't really sign a new lease until I know where I'm going to be living six months from now. Triple quadruple argh.